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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. # 

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Ihi^F |W'SW |a. A-/ 



UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. 



THE 



QUESTION OF HELL. 



An Essay in New Orthodoxy. 



BY A PURITAN. 






t> 



eirii XoXbI, o5? \6yia &aov' 



WILSON & COMPANY. 
NEW YORK : AMERICAN NEWS COMPANY. 

1873, 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 
Wilson & Co.. in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at 
Washington. 




Press of Denisos, Grenell & Babkbr, 
New Haven, Conn. 






ERRATA. 

p. 27, line 3 ; for ''to that," read ''tluit to." 

p. 74, line 3 ; for ''AN" read "ON." 

p. 76, fifth line from bottom, for "wliere" read "wlieiiec." 

.p. 81, line 2 ; for "to God" read "of God." 

p. 85, line 6 ; for "lasting" read ''hasting." 

p. 89, line 8; for "sight" read "sigh." 

p. 101, lines 1 and 2, belong as lines 2 and 8 on the next page, 

p. 102, last line ; for "annointed" read ^'anohited." 



P R E F ACE. 



The essay here published is intended to break ground in 
the direction of that nevv^ providential interpretation of 
Christianity which is evidently, and with power and author- 
ity, breaking forth from Christian thought and learning and 
experience, in our age of emancipated and enlightened in- 
quiry. The pages which follow assume the certainty of 
these three facts* — {!) that Christian confession, in its most 
unquestioned and thorough types, is in our day undergoing 
profound regeneration, through the operation evidently of 
that inward spirit and truth of holiness and love which offer 
the most indisputable mark of genuine Gospel faith ; (2) that, 
through this regeneration, accredited external orthodoxy — 
what is called simply " orthodoxy" in the following pages — 
IS giving way to a new, a more profound, and a far more cor- 
rect orthodoxy ; and (3) that one of the ripest and most evi- 
dent fruits of this change is the hope, the belief, the courage 
to implicitly and joyfully trust, that the family of God's moral 
and spiritual creation is absolutely one through God in 
Clirist reconciling the world unto himself, and that heavenly 
growth to holiness and blessedness, according to a christen- 



PREFACE. 

ing and redeeming power of God working in us, is assured 
beyond all question, not alone to such as spiritual help 
reaches effectually in the present initial life, but to those also 
who fall into the abj^ss of God's future inexorable punish- 
ment of sin, or who through ignorance are all their life here 
alienated from wisdom and holiness. 

That the Divine Kingdom over all souls, revealed in 
Christ, is one of discipline fully adequate to bring every 
creature to the stature of a perfect man, its tremendous se- 
verities no less than its evident mercies designed in sure wis- 
dom and perfect love, and the Creator's gift, in the very na- 
ture ot the creature under Divine Fatherhood, a boon of 
eternal life without exception or repentance, is the solemn, 
joyful conviction with v\^hich the discussion of this little vol- 
ume has been undertaken. The chkistekixg fatkekhood 
of God, with its illustration and sacramental symbol in the 
CHRISTENED HUMANITY of Jcsus, to, the imitation of which, 
and heirship of God with which, we are called, would seem 
to be upon close discrimination, the very truth of Christ for 
immediate practical use, until we all come in the unity of the 
faith, and of the knovrledge of the Son of God, unto a per- 
fect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
Christ. 

That this truth has been no more distinctly and profoundly 
beld, and has only now begun to take the form of loyalty to 
God and love to man for tlie redemption unto holiucss and 
heaven of every creature, may be ascribed to this cause — the 
fact that Disciples' Christianity has always proceeded upon a 
wrong principle, suggested by the natui-al and Judaic rather 



PREFACE. 

than the regencT-ate and Christian mind, and has never to 
any great historical purpose correctly represented the gen- 
uine spiritual method of original Christian teaching. Jesus 
told his own chosen that they must change entirely in order 
to enter the kingdom in very truth. That he cannot have 
referred to the conditions of provisional discipleship and per- 
sonal salvation, is plain upon the face of the matter. He 
must have referred to the change from very imperfect pro- 
visional discipleship, to that complete imitation of himself 
and thorougli discipleship which sliould make them vnth 
him fully sons of God and heirs of the Divine Kingdom. 
N'ow tliis change was never made, at least not in any thor- 
ough external way, and in consequence Judaic and natural 
self-assertion and opinion have thus far ruled the external 
course oi Christian liistory, and instead of spiritual conform- 
ity to Christ, and faith rooted and grounded in the love 
which lie pronounced the true test of real discipleship, there 
has prevailed a dogma about Jesus, witli related dogmas and 
practices, too often flagrantly false to the divine lavv' of love. 
Jesus felt constrained to say to an ardent burst of dogmatic 
devotion in Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan." It was 
because the Christ which Peter took him to be was a thor- 
ouglil}^ false Christ, inasmuch as it savored of sotting up Je- 
sus- in a way not consistent with true sacrifice to God. Yet 
to this day imitation of Peter's zeal in opinion of Jesus has 
greatly outrun imitation of Christ's pure sacrifice, and for the 
Gospel i.deal of holiness and love, reflected in the obedience 
of Jesus, we have gospellers' ideas ol dogma and ordinance. 
A discipleship faithfully attempting to obey the repeated and 



PREFACE. 

Imperative cautions and rebukes aaddressed te the first disci- 
ples, to save them from doing as the heathen did and from 
following false traditions of Judaism, was not attempted by 
primitive Christianity apart from Paul's single struggle against 
the older and more immediate apostles, and Paul barely 
fought down for himself the ban of Petrine orthodoxy, and 
left no successor to his great task. 

But what no Father, no Reformer, no Doctor of the 
Church, had so much as attemjDted, universal Christian learn- 
ing and life have groped towards always, and have uncon- 
sciously reached to no small degree within recent years, until 
it seems only necessary for some clear providential word to 
be spoken to inaugurate a reform exceeding in significance 
everything humanly undertaken on behalf of Christianity 
since Paul rested from his labors. Such a reform would re- 
cur to the Christian discernment which characterized Paul, 
to divide, in prophetic record, evangelic report, and apostolic 
teaching, between the very truth of Christ and the intruding 
leaven of Petrine opinion, and to make definite and thorough 
and conclusive that evolution of the spirit of holiness and love 
which has become the prevailing highest mood of Christen- 
dom. 

It is in the hope that providence and inspiration are indeed 
bringing about this comprehensive reconsideration of Chris- 
tian method and matter, and are preparing thereby a new 
birth of historical Christianity, a regeneration equal to bring- 
ing home our faith to awakened mankind, that the present, 
and some other essays have been prepared, as studies in new 
orthodoxy. The penman has endeavored to recur to the gen- 



ulne melliod of our faith, that of partial and provisioiliil 
dependence only on text and record, and of a considerable 
looking unto the unwritten oracles of christened conscience 
and reason, the lights of that eternal AYord which abundantly 
aids patient search guided by fervent loyalty to God and 
love to man. And after the manner of this dependence on 
providence and spirit, he has ventured an appeal of strong 
confidence to the name and authority of inspiration, as lie 
discerns it in the pure thoughts now deeply moving the Chris- 
tian mind, and, as of the very truth of God in Christ, has pro- 
posed to move the previous question of the Christian JReligion 
— Holiness and Love— upon the dogmatic orthodoxies of sect 
and creed and church, w^hich have been created after the 
opinions of men, and not after God in righteousness and true 
holiness. The essay now published opens a discussion which 
will be continued in other essays, more specifically devoted 
to interpreting the essential truth of Christ according to the 
writer's conception of new, or regenerate and (rue ortho- 
doxy. 
New Haven, Sept. 1st, 1873. 



THE 



QUESTION OF HELL. 



ORTHODOX PERPLEXITY. 



There is in our day no more significant theologi- 
cal spectacle than that of the orthodox world with 
the dogma of eternal punishment in its hands. 
How not to hold it and how not to drop it, is the 
problem which drives believers and preachers into 
all sorts of experimental speculations. It seems as 
if evangelical faith must break, or at least ease, 
the yoke of strict orthodox dogma, or perish in the 
attempt. 

THE MISCHIEFS OF UNCERTAIN TEACHING. 

The plan of neither holding nor dropping a dog- 
ma so conspicuous and significant as that of the 
eternal perdition of sinners, palsies faith and mor- 
ality to a perilous degree, neither that nor any 
other definite view of retribution being distinctly 
preached to doubting and tempted men. A com- 



12 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 



't 



prehensive indecision marks the popular pulpit^ and 
to avoid speaking decisively on great topics of 
sound divinity^ preachers resort to the small themes 
of the passing earthly spectacle^ and we hear the 
catchwords of public gossip instead of the terms of 
gospel truth. The name of some Jim or Jack of 
rascality, made notorious by a violent death, runs 
the round of the pulpits of the land, with an inter- 
est keener a great deal than commonly attaches to 
the name of Jesus. Not that dogmatic views oi 
Jesus are not abundant, nor that everybody would 
not be greatly shocked at the mere thought of any- 
thing conflicting with those views, but simply 
this, that certain grand aspects of that name, sucii 
as that of redemption from eternal misery through 
it alone, are become so perplexing, if not so doubt- 
ful, to average belief, in and cut ot the pulpit, that 
very few people want, and very few preachers can 
give, a.ny distinct, decisive message on such points, 
and all are content to postpone judgment to come, 
and find a theme of Sunday interest in the last 
topic of the day. It may be taken for certain that 
an overwhelming overthrow of dogma, by the in- 
road of positive heresy, would be far better than 
this terribly shaken and doubtful state of the be- 
lieving mind, and that any energetic attempt to 
take some ground, clearly and vigorously, with 
definition and argument, should be heartily wel- 
comed. 



THE QUESTION OF HELL, 13 

AN UNOllTHODOX HELL. 

In this view of the case, an unusual interest may 
well attach to a treatise on The Duration and Na- 
ture of Future Pimishment^ (by Henry Constable, 
M. A. Prebendary of Cork), which Prof. C. L. Ives, 
M. D., of Yale College, has introduced to Ameri- 
can readers, in a pamphlet j)ublished not long 
since at New Haven ; especially as Prof. Ives very 
distinctly and forcibly avows his own conversion 
to the theory of Mr. Constable, and makes, in a 
brief introduction, a noteworthy confession and 
plea, to the most serious jDrejudice of the current 
orthodox dogma. As a means of getting a firm 
and intimate hold of the subject, the more signifi- 
cant statements of these two witnesses are of great 
value. Both continue to adhere with the most 
pious sincerity to the absolute authority of Scrip- 
ture, and both assert a thorough dogma of eternal 
perdition, at the same time that they destroy root 
and branch, in their own earnest and carefully rea- 
soned conviction, the old orthodox idea of what 
perdition is, and do this with an incidental expos- 
ure of the interior of orthodoxy, which is alone 
worthy of the most thoughtful, not to say anxious, 
attention. If any considerable proportion of or- 
thodox believers are still strict in belief on no bet- 
ter ground than that which Mr. Constable and 
Prof. Ives appear to have stood upon, we may well 



14 THE Q UESTION OF HELL, 

expect some great catastrophe to the dogma called 
orthodox, either a downfall of orthodoxy, or a total 
change of front, which shall give it the aspect of a 
new departure, more significant than any which 
has taken place since Paul turned the infant 
church out of its judaic nest, adrift over the wide 
uncertainties of a world of heathenism. 

AN ORTHODOX WITNESS AGAINST ETERNAL HELL. 

The confession and plea of the New Haven Pro- 
fessor, which serves as a preface to Mr. Con- 
table's treatise, in the publication to which we 
have referred, deserves, and will repay, distinct 
consideration. Professor Ives, though evidently 
grounded to the fullest measure of piety in dog- 
matic orthodoxy, and an able and scholarly inquir- 
er, is, as a professor of medicine for the body 
rather than the soul, a layman in divinity, and on 
this account somewhat more frank and energetic, 
as a convert, than an occupant of a pulpit would 
have been. At any rate he says things which are 
very much to the point of thorough and candid dis- 
cussion. To begin with, he remarks upon his own 
state of mind, while yet professing an orthodox 
faith, in the following terms : 

^' Taught from childhood, as doubtless you also have been, 
that all souls are possessed of immortality, and that, for the 
wicked ones, hell is a place of eternal torment, I ever accepted 
the belief, and for years have earnestly enforced it upon others. 
But, during a recent journey in Europe, my faith in that doc- 



THE QUESTIOJSr 01^ HELL, 15 

trine was staggered by the sight of the multitudes there and 
at the thought of the outlying millions stiil of Asia and 
Africa, all hurrying on to God's tribunal. Can it be, that in 
their heedlessness and ignorance, or in their delusive strivings 
after pardon, they are to meet a doom such as, in its infinity 
of torture, the human mind could neither conceive nor en- 
dure the thought of '? I had learned to know somewhat of the 
love of God, tlie Creator and upholder of these lost millions ; 
how could I reconcile that with the accepted doctrine of 
uaendinrj sulTering? I did try, faithfully ; even, in these 
struggles of the mind, writing home to a doubting Christian 
brother to confirm him in this belief, which 1 feared was 
slipping from under me." 



EDUCATION CHIEFLY OCCASIONS THE ORTHODOX 
FAITH IN HELL. 

It appears from this statement, that Dr. Ives is 
now conscious that education has been the chief 
occasion of his belief, although that belief has gone 
to the extent of earnest effort to persuade others. 
This doubtless is the average ground of a similar 
belief. Our orthodox Christians accept, insist on, 
and vigorously contend for, extreme dogmas, chiefly 
because they have been taught to do so, and find 
that it is the rule to do so. And by consequence^ 
if ever a large view of the facts of the case is 
brought home to their minds their belief can hardly 
feil, having a chiefly traditional foundation, to 
experience a shock. 

DANGER OF REALLY THINKING WHAT HELL MEANS. 

Dr. Ives was staggered when he came to really 
think about it for himself. That he had not be- 



16 THE Q UESIION OF HELL, 

fore thought about it seems the sole explanation 
of his previous unshaken confidence that the dogma 
of eternal perdition is indeed true. A similar fail- 
ure to really think about it^ to comprehend even a 
little the whole case^ is doubtless the explanation 
of ordinary assent to a dogma so fearful to real 
thought as that which passes current under the 
name of eternal j^unishment. It may be taken 
almost for granted that no mind fully alive to 
moral realities ever gave a full assent to this 
dogma. Either men suppose themselves doing 
thisj while in fact hopes^ or at least thoughts, of 
mercy, are holding them back from full assent, or 
they give a thorough assent because they are radi- 
cally selfish and bad, and they think to buy their 
own security by heartily consenting to promiscuous 
perdition. 

FAITH IN HELL UNNATURAL TO A CHRISTIAN MIND. 

To be rooted and grounded in i\iQ thought of 
damnation for others, in the same way that a soul 
may be rooted and grounded in love, is not possi- 
ble to a Christian, if indeed it be to anything but 
a devil. This being the case, it is plain that Dr. 
Ives is now a witness against his former self, to the 
effect that, without thinking, and from the effect 
of education, he held, in Christ's name, a doctrine 
worthy of the mind of a devil. And this we shall 



THE QUESTION OF HELL, 17 

find both Dr. Ives and Mr. Constable admitting to 
liave been the case. 

INFINITE TORTURE OF SOULS INCREDIBLE. 

The great question which rose out of Dr. Ives' 
consciousness of the divine love, like an island 
upheaved from the dej^ths of the sea, never to sink 
from view again, is a question which no thoroughly 
awakened mind can escape — Is infinite torture of 
souls possible to GOD ? The common disposition 
of this question is a verdict of not 2^'^oven. Most 
good persons, who think upon the subject, quietly 
record this verdict, as one would slyly draw back a 
bolt, and there leave the matter. They do not 
permit themselves to go a single step further, or 
even to admit that they cherish a hope for the 
wicked. They innocently disguise, even to them- 
selves, much more in argument with others, their 
real hope and trust, by earnestly considering and 
urging the reasons why we should act as if the 
peril of hell were beyond all doubt. In experiences 
which make them take definite ground, and compel 
them to show where they stand, they let their hope 
appear, or even their distinct and firm confidence, 
at the same time that they avoid any very open or 
thorough denial of the real dead dogma, and do 
not venture to profess any very decisive faith that 
God rules to redeem. Thus a doctrine of hell, 
which is of hell in every sense, gets borne on upon 



18 THE Q UES TlOJSr OF HELL. 

the current of general faith, though no more a part 
of that faith than a dead log is of the living stream 
on which it rides to the sea. When education^ 
therefore, shall cease to insist on this dogma, the 
average Christian mind will be emancipated from 
it, and faith in redemption, which is now whis- 
pered in the ear, will be the open confession of all. 

DOGMATIC TEMPTATION TO DISHONESTY. 

Dr. Ives tells us that at the very time that his 
faith was staggered by thoughts which he could 
not suj^press, he tried to act as if no such doubt 
troubled his own mind. He even avows that he 
urged a doubting brother not to doubt, at the very 
moment that he was himself doubting. Such re- 
sult of a perplexed faith must not surprise us, 
much less lead us to harsh judgment. It is as 
honest in the motive as it is otherwise in the act, 
and we must understand rather than rebuke. But 
if the very worst trick of mind is not to be accepted 
as a means of grace, we must energetically put 
away all such untruth of profession and plea ; ear- 
nestly follow light as providence and spirit bring it 
to our minds, and avoid false confession as a device 
of the father of lies. 

DOGMATIC UNVERACITY. 

Dr. Ives did perhaps own to his doubting brother 
that he also was in doubt, and did not profess, or 



THE QUESTION 01 HELL. 19 

implyj a confidence greater than he really had. If 
this was not the case, however ; if Dr. Ives, with 
his own mind shaken, urged unshaken conviction, 
his act was not one whit more moral intrinsically 
than any other false sacrifice to Grod^ but was as 
thoroughly heathen and superstitious as if it had 
been done on the banks of the Granges, by the most 
ignorant of idolaters. We are not bound to con- 
fession, much less to argument, of our heart's 
faith j but to attempt either, except in truth and 
sincerity, and especially to attempt argument to 
wliich our own confession would give the lie, is 
neither praise to God, nor benefit to man, but one 
of the greatest delusions and mischiefs possible. 

CHRISTIANITY DEMANDS TRUTH OF CONVICTION. 

The habit of falsifying real convictions in a sup- 
posed duty of standing up for beliefs which are 
slipping away from us, is doubtless exceedingly 
common. We at least have met it frequently in 
our intimate experience of the orthodox religious 
world. And it is our deep conviction that nothing 
so much as this deserves to be considered against 
the rule of Christian faith. That faith places 
every soul under the providence and spirit of God, 
for every motion of the mind, as well as every act 
of life. Careful, therefore, as we may be not to 
boldly assume the finger of God in our experience, 



20 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

we are bound to trust the divine leading of our 
most earnest efforts to have truth of thought and 
hope and trust and purpose in the inner man ; and 
when such efforts bring us to profound question- 
ings ; when they drive the ploughshare of doubt 
through old faith^ to open deeper ground of new 
faith ; we are bound to study honesty as well as 
humility, and to no more think of telling, by word 
or act, what is not true, to a doubting brother, 
than we would tell a lie to the Holy Grhost. 

THE CRIME AGAINST CHRIST. 

The Christian communion of our day sadly needs 
open and free confession among its members. 
Those of our dogmatists who treat such confession 
as a crime, are sinning with a high hand against 
the pure doctrine of Christ. They are Jesuits as 
much worse than the Catholic ever were as the 
new inquiry of our day is deeper than that which 
sprang up on Catholic ground. If it please Grod 
to decimate, once and again, our orthodox doctors 
of divinity,*-''* with a plague of sudden summons from 
this scene of struggling faith, and pour upon them 

* Such persons wiU find the story of Ananias and Sapphira 
a much needed lesson, if they will, in a truthful figure, take 
the former to represent Catholic Ecclesiasticism, and the lat- 
ter Protestant dogmatism. The feet of the young men who 
carried out the former, dead by the hand of God, about the 
space of three historical hours ago, are at the dooi\ and shall 
carry thee out^ thou mother of lies, Protestant Dogmatism ! 



THE Q UUS2I0N' OF HELL. 21 

that remain a spirit of honest opening of their 
hearts, that in the fear of God we may all reason 
together of the things that concern our peace, it 
will be more to the purpose of the coming of the 
kingdom of God on earth than anything which has 
occurred since Jesus said plainly to a chief apostle, 
Get thee behind 7ne, Satan, 

LITERAL DEATH IN HELL. 

Dr. Ives found in Mr. Constable's treatise on 
Future Punishment the doctrine that eternal death 
is literally death, the extinction, through the 
plague of sin and the pains of hell, of the sinful 
soul ; and this he accepted as a substitute for the 
orthodox dogma of eternal torment. 

ETERNAL EXTINCTION PUT FOR ETERNAL HELL. 

The spirit and method of his conversion to this 
doctrine of eternal extinction of the wicked, he 
indicates in these sentences : 

*' This view of the future, professedly derived from the 
word of God, I carefully and prayerfully compared with the 
Scripture record. And there, as I believe, I found it ; and so 
plainly set forth, I could but wonder that I had so long over 
loo.ved it. I had been blinded, as I believe we all are, by the 
idea that immortality must be a necessary attribute of every 
soul, and so the truth had heretofore lain concealed. But 
with the sweeping away of that error, a clearer light is shed 
upon the Holy Word itself, which I can nov/ understand as it 
was written, not as it is explained for me by commentators. 

"Rejecting the traditional dogma of the soul's essential 
immortality, denied, it would seem, if anything can be, in the 
Bible, our doubts and difficulties vanish with it. The justice 



22 THE QUESTION OF HELL, 

of God, and the question of the origin and end of evil, no 
longer now need the unsatisfactory explanation of theologic 
essayists. 

*'The popular theory that 'every soul is immortal,' is the 
original lie of our sinful world. It was first uttered in Eden ^ 
when Satan declared to our tempted parents — ' Ye shall not 
surely die ' ; in the same words it is repeated by the Univer- 
salist of our day ; and it is repeated still, though it be unwit- 
tingly and in other words, by every orthodox religious 
teacher, when he proclaims — 'Ye shall live forever in j^our 
sins,' . , The arch-deceiver has for centuries persuaded the 
Christian Church that his lie was not far from the truth. . . 
Sad that our Protestant forefathers, when they took their 
stand upon the Bible, and rejected the many errors of a cor- 
rupted Church, had not also recognized and rejected this 
early device of the Old Serpent." 

ORTHODOX SOPHISTRY CONTEMNED. 

Here again we see that the old view^ though 
firmly held as Bible doctrine^ was beset with doubts 
and difficulties^ and that to meet these Dr. Ives had 
found only '' the unsatisfactory explanation of the- 
ological essayists."' It is a sweeping sentence of 
contempt against the masters of New England 
divinity, to brush them aside in this way, as theo- 
logical essayists ; but Dr. Ives is evidently sure of 
his ground, though it be in high disrespect to Tay- 
lor and Dwight, who v/ere masters in New Haven^ 
and to still greater names, with whom has rested 
the credit of having placed the orthodox system 
upon a foundation of impregnable reasoning. Prof. 
Park said in the great Boston Council of Congre- 
gationalists a few years since, that an educated 
man^ who was not a Calvinist, was not a respecta- 



THE Q UESTIOJSr OF HELL. 2Z 

ble man ; and this rough witticism Dr. Taylor, the 
New Haven dogmatist of some years since, who 
fills a large place in American theological history, 
would have echoed, at least in its spirit. But here 
comes a voice from the very camp of Park and Taylor, 
a voice that must be deemed at least respectable, to 
stigmatize the very key of the orthodox position as 
unsatisfactory theological essaying. There is all 
the more f jrce in the thrust, from the fact that the 
author of it evidently had no purpose to be con- 
temptuous. He simply breaks out with lervent 
satisfaction at being delivered from the cruel mer- 
cies of a sophistical dogmatism. 

A FALSE USE OF SCRIPTURE CONFESSED. 

It is from Bible to Bible, from text to text, nay 
from sense to sense within the same texts, that Dr. 
Ives has made this journey out of the old into the 
new. The spectacle is an instructive one. Dr. 
Ives confesses that he has read the Bible with 
blinded eyes. He charges this blindness in part 
upon the use of commentators ; in part upon 
ideas instilled into him from childhood. He has 
doubtless avoided heterodox commentators, and 
has studiously used such helps as he knew would 
confirm his traditional faith. This is the common 
course ot lay, and even of clerical study, so that 
most are in precisely the position which Dr. Ives 



2.4 THE q UESTION OF HELL, 

says that he \vas in until lately ; they read what 
they believe and believe what they read^ and are 
mere devout parrots of orthodox tradition^ no more 
grounded in thorough intelligence than if mind 
had been given us to be suppressed^ and confession 
were truest as a service of the lips^ irrespective of 
the motion of the heart. 

UNCERTAINTIES OF ORTHODOX INTERPRETATION. 

Dr. Ives is now confident that he has heretofore 
rested in a plainly erroneous and exceedingly per- 
verse interpretation of Scripture. If this be in- 
deed so^ who is to assure us that average orthodoxy 
is not equally plunging into the ditch^ not merely 
as it must be, if Dr. Ives is now right, but on 
ather momentous points of faith ? How does Dr. 
Ives know that his eyes are even now open to the 
very truth of God, even on the topic to which Jiis 
new views relate .^ 

A mere shifting of the kaleidoscope of texts is 
alone a very uncertain ground to go upon. Dr. 
Ives must be aware that even the Mormon delusion 
is, in its own way, mighty in the Scriptures. IJe 
sees, in Mr. Constable's admissions, that the logic 
of Universalist argument with orthodoxy has been 
legitimate, if all souls, as orthodoxy assumes, are 
indeed immortal. Many a hasty disputant, or 
even wild fanatic, has prayerfully compared his 



THE q UJbJSTlON OF HELL, 25 

view with the word of God, and found pegs enough 
to hang his notions on. So it is hardly as cheer- 
ful for Dr. Ives's readers as for himself, to find how 
entirely the aspect of Scripture teaching has 
changed in his mind, and how very sure he is that 
he was until lately quite blinded by false notions, 
and now sees holy v/rit as it really is. 

WHY NOT A STEP FURTHER ? 

May it not be (hat he who lately saw not at all, 
now^ barely sees men as trees walking, and that 
another point of view would occasion a further rev- 
olution in his belief.^ It by no means follows that 
one touch, even of the hand which is miracle itself, 
leaves nothing more to be done. Dr. Ives no lon- 
ger believes in the eternal torture of souls in hell. 
If he were to go and wash in the waters of a purely 
spiritual reading of Scripture, he might see the 
lost, not as cinders of damnation, but as brands 
snatched from the burning, saved as by fire, after 
some method worthy at once of perfect justice and 
absolute mercy. 

A SUSPICIOUS FOUNDATION. 

It is a curious circumstance that the turn which 
orthodoxy has taken in the convictions of Dr. Ives, 
hinges on absolute denial of the great doctrine of 
the immortality of the soul. And we must say 
that this seems a very suspicious circumstance.. 



26 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

Blinded by this idea of the sours immortality, are 
all men^ says Dr. Ives. If this were a mere dogma 
of the creed^ and not at once an instinct and a 
reasoned conviction of natural religion^ it would be 
less difficult to consent to the account which Dr, 
Ives gives of it. 

Or^ if we take the other ground^ that immortal- 
ity is a doctrine of special revelation, what is to 
become of the claim that through Christ this great 
hope was brought to light ? There has been a 
grand confidence in the Christain mind because of 
this claim, and if we are now to learn that this 
confidence was not just, the situation becomes ex- 
ceedingly painful. There has seemed to be a di- 
vine magnanimity in this beam of light out of 
eternity, touching with bright promise the head of 
every creature, and to withdraw this, and say that 
by nature we were never meant to be any more 
than the beasts that perish, and that only to such 
as find Christ does there open any the least pros- 
pect of continued existence, seems like a shabby 
deception. Doubtless theology has been in some 
respects a shabby deceiver, but this great tenet of 
human expectation and Christian confidence, has 
so risen on the world with immeasurable sj^lendor^ 
and has had such a career of inextinguishable 
brightness through mid heaven, that we reluct- 
antly assist as docile spectators while Dr. Ives and 



THE q UESTIOJSr OF HELL. 27 

another excellent gentleman show ns that the 
beaming eye of Godhead is only a lantern after all, 
and to that man as man the path of existence has 
never known, and never can know, the light of day. 

THE OLD SERPENT IN ORTHODOXY. 

The terms in which Dr. Ives tenders ns his as- 
surance of knowledge on this subject, add. to the 
perplexity with which we listen to him. The idea 
of immortality he pronounces ^Hhe original lie of 
our sinful world,"' and this lie he finds in the mouth 
of •' every orthodox religious teacher," disguised a 
little, but identical with the primal satanic false- 
hood. The blood of all Christendom is ^^oisoned, 
on this theory, with the virus of the Old Serpent, 
and where theology has most thought that its work 
was divinity, it has really blundered into diabolism. 

It may be so. The heart of man is unquestion- 
ably deceitful, and desperately perverse, in nothing 
more than in its dogmatic conceits, its raw opinion 
consecrated by long tradition under the name of 
religion. The candid scholar, once that his atten- 
tion is called to the subject, must confess that it is 
quite possible that some of our most cherished 
dogmas are really no better than survivals of hea- 
thenism, handed down from age to age, in a more 
and more disguised form, as elements of revelation. 
But if this is the case, and especially if it has been 



2 8 THE Q UUSTIOlSr OF HELL, 

the case in res]3ect of one of the great points of 
orthodoxy, can ^Ye rest so easily as Dr. Ives does in 
qualified orthodoxy ? May it not "be that the sat- 
isfaction with which he reflects on the loss, by ex- 
tinction, of a large part of mankind, is just as much 
from the Old Serpent as the view on that subject 
which Christians generally hold ? 

FAITH IX HELL BADLY SHAKEN. 

Dr. Ives has some remarks on the condition of 
the Christian mind on the question of eternal pun- 
ishment, which merit a moment's consideration, 
before we proceed to the larger field of Mr. Consta- 
ble' s argument. Dr. Ives says : 

"A candid, not dogmatic and Litter, review of the grounds 
of our belief regarding future punishment is greatly needed 
at the present day. I speak for the laymen as one of them, 
and I know also, that not a few of our devout and thoughtful 
clergymen have Serious difficulties on this point Hear this 
testimony from that well-known preacher and Bible expos- 
itor, Rev. Albert Barnes. Speaking of sin's entrance into the 
world, and of that eternity of suffering lie felt constrained to 
teach, he declares : 

"' These are /^e:'/, not imaginary difficulties. . . I confess, 
for one, I feel them, and feel them the more sensibly and 
powerfully the more I look at them, and the longer I live. 
. . I do not know that I have a ray of light on this subject, 
which I had not wlien the subject first flashed across my soul. 
I liave read, to some extent, what wise and good men have 
written. I have looked at their various theories and expla- 
nations. I have endeavored to weigh their arguments, for 
my whole soul pants for light and relief on tliese questions. 
But I get neither ; and in the distress aad aaguisli of my own 
spirit, I confess that I see no light whatever. I see not one 
ray to disclose to me the reason why sin came into the world ; 
why the earth is strewed with the dying and the dead, and 



THE QUESlIOlSr OF HELL. 29 

'Why man must suffer to all eternity. I have never seen a 
particle of light thrown on these subjects that has given a 
moment's ease to my tortured mind. . , It is all dark — 
dark — dark, to my soul, and I cannot disguise it.' 

" * In the midst of this gloom,' as he styles it, Mr. Barnes 
comforts himself with the belief that, it must be that the 
Judge of all the earth will do right, though appearances are 
so much aganist it; it seeming never to occur to him that his 
owji theology, and not the revealed truth, is here at fault. 
Others of our religious teachers live on in silence, seeking 
relief from tliesc felt difficulties in a smothered hope in uni- 
versal salvation, or at least a final restoration of the wicked, 
or el^^e they fancy a probation beyond the grave ; in either 
case failing to give decided utterance ot that future woe, so 
solemnly enforced by the Great Preacher." 

NO LIGHT IX ORTHODOXY. 

That neither lis^ht nor relief are ever found by 
a deeply thoughtful mind in strict orthodoxy ; that 
they are very commonly found in a smothered hope 
of universal salvation, or of final restoration, or at 
least of a probation beyond the grave ; and that in 
tliis state of the case doctrinal teaching has become 
hesitating and reticent, and almost imbecile, are 
things which any one may see for himself after 
some good degree of acquaintance with the move- 
ments of the orthodox world. 

THE NEW CHRISTIAN HOPE. 

About the only thing that discreet and instruct- 
ed thinkers now pretend to say is that it must be 
that the Judge of all the earth will do right ; and 
very few of these can deny that appearances, on 
the orthodox theory, are anything but right. We 



30 THE QUESTIOJ^ 01 HELL, 

may feel pretty sure, therefore, that some great 
overturning is in preparation, some sweej)ing round 
to a new base of the deathless energies of our faith, 
and that we perhaps who live may be even now 
hearing the first signals of the greatest change 
which providence and spirit have yet prepared for 
Christian mankind. Let us then with unflinching 
courage trim and refill the sacred lamp of inquiry 
after Grod, and wait with patience for the glorious 
appearing which is to bring a new heavens and a 
new earth. 

THKEE OPINIONS ABOUT HELL. 

Mr. Constable's treatise, to which reference has 
been made, is a very able plea for a peculiar view 
of eternal punishment. We propose to follow him 
througli the more striking points of his statement, 
and to make the course of his argument a point of 
departure for such suggestions as we desire to 
offer. The initial statement of Mr. Constable's 
position is in the following passage : 

*' There are three main opinions relative to this punish- 
ment. One of these makes it to be essentially of a puraaUve 
nature, to be temporary in its daration, and to have as its issue 
the restoration of all to God's favor and eternal happiness. 
This was the opinion of Origen. The second is that which 
has long been most co'imionly received. It makes punish- 
ment to be eternal in its duration, and supposes it to consist 
in an eternal life spent in miser}^ and pain. This was the 
theory of St. Augustine. According to the third opinion, 
punishment is also eternal, but deaths i. e. the loss oflife^ is its 
essence, attended and preceded by such various decrees of 



THE Q UESTIOR OF HELL, 31 

pain as a just and merciful God, for wise reasons, sees fit to 
inflict. The third of tliese opinions is the one iiere main- 
tained. Its establishment will of course set aside tlie others. 
Its eternal duration will overthrow that of Origen ; its char- 
acter, involving a state of death, will overthrow alike that of 
Origen and Augustine." — p. 1. 

HELL AS PURGATION OF EVIL. 

Rearranging for our own purposes llie course of 
the discussion, we will first hear more explicitly in 
regard to the view here connected with the great 
name of Origen. Mr. Constable has this to say, in 
further explanation, and in qualified defence, of 
this view : 

*' Origen converts hell into avast purgatory, and sends men 
and devils forth from it purified and humbled to the feet of 
the Great Father and to the joys whicli are at his right hand 
forevermore." — p. 59, 

*' In one grand feature of his theory he commands our 
entire sympathy. He looked forward to the extinction of 
evil. His 3'earning for it Avas true, was but following out the 
judgment and reason as well as the longing of every ]-ight 
heart. We cannot look at evil — its hatefulness, its miserj^ its 
pollution -and think tliat with such a God as ours this evil 
will be permitted to extend or to exist forever. So thought 
Origen, and Scripture bears him out." — p. G3. 

*'Evil is not to be eternal . . . God has pledged his 
word and his power tliat it shall be abolished and destroyed. . 
He has promised a * rest'dutlon of all tli'ngs' by the mouth of all 
his holy prophets since the world began."— p. 43. 

GOD ETERNALLY AGAINST EVIL. 

Here doubtless is the deepest foundation on 
which faith can build, the thought of God as 
against all evil forever. If we can tell what this 
against all evil forever should really mean, and 



82 THE Q UE8 TION^ OF HTELL. 

what it should not mean, we solve the problems of 
divinity. The great things therefore^ is to discover 
how to keep true to this thought, how to get and 
to apply the real meaning of it. 

HOW TO BE WITH GOD AGAINST EVIL. 

As far as we know, one of the simplest and most 
exact rules for this momentous business of keeping- 
true to Grod, as the perfection of resistance to evil, 
is the old Hebrew rule '^ To do justly, to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." If 
our concern about justice is practical rather than 
speculative ; if from it Ave proceed to active love of 
our fellow-man, after the manner of mercy, which 
dictates help, redemption, and good hope ; and if 
we bow our heads in simple worship before God, 
not attempting to read, much less to judge, his 
plan of the government of the universe, we may 
expect to find ourselves becoming rooted in a true 
faith in God. 

ORTHODOX DIVINITY BEGINS EXACTLY WRONG. 

This is the exact opposite of the usual method 
in divinity. Commonly our teaching puts a slight 
upon mere doing justice on our part, and demands 
rather that we consider what is the infinite justice, 
and its bearing upon our own fate. So far from 
being urged to rest in loving mercy, and to make 



THE Q TIE8TI0N OF HELL, 33 

this the vestibule, as it were, of approach to God, we 
are bid take heed to the Divine wrath and our own 
selfish need of mercy, and to look out for our own 
salvation, and rest not one jot in trying to live for 
others. And as for humility as the ground and 
rule of our coming to God, we are rather summoned 
to inordinate ambition to enter familiarly into a 
comi)rehensive acquaintance with the mind and 
ways of Deity, quite as if our salvation depended 
on our knowing a fair proportion at least of the 
secrets of the universe, and on our taking a hand, 
at least by proxy, in keeping up the dignities of 
Godhead. This scheme of obsequious attention in the 
presence of God, of studying mercy as from God to 
ourselves instead of from ourselves to our fellows, 
and of slurring righteousness of conduct as ^^ filthy 
rags'' in the sight of God, exactly reverses the 
prophet's rule, on no ground whatever of real 
truth. 

THE SIMPLEST DUTIES OUR CHIEF CONCERN. 

It is both clear reason and evident revelation 
that our chief concern is with our nearest and 
simplest duties ^ those of common justice, of right 
conduct of man with man ; and with that ivorh of 
good loillj of kindness and love, of tenderness of 
heart, which has grov/n more and more upon the 
Christian and the human conscience as a divine 



34 THE Q UESTION OF HELL. 

task ; and that when we have thus put ourselves 
to use, and have done with our might whatever 
our hands find to do, there only remains to us the 
loyalty of humble reliance on God, submission! 
without question or doubt, the submission of peni-' 
tence, of trust, of unspeakable peace, as becomes 
children taught by providence and spirit, by law 
prophecy, and gospel, to say, simply and sincerely, 
'' Our Father/' 

SYSTEMATIC DIVINITY A DISTURBER. 

So far as systematic divinity has turned men 
away from this faith and practice of justice, mercy, 
and humble confidence in God, so far it has done 
wrong, after the manner, alas ! of human conceit, 
which is not the manner of grace and truth. The- 
religious world is filled with the noise of loud pre- 
tension, the thousand voices of ambition to stand 
high before God, instead of to walk humbly with 
him, and mercy and justice are thought no rules at 
all for redemption, but only incidents of that pride 
of near approach to God which is miscalled faith. 

NO EXCUSE FOR PHARISAIC PRETENSION. 

The putting all this upon the name of Jesus 
makes it no better. To be ready and confident 
through Jesus in no way excuses the mistake. We 
may mean to honor Jesus in professing an exten- 
sive personal acquaintance with the plans of the 



THE Q UESTIOJSr OF HELL. 35 

Eternal Mind, and in attaching ourselves famil- 
iarly to God, assuming for ourselves a special dig- 
nity of peculiar sonship, and we may think we 
have great warrant, in Scripture for example, for 
doing this, but the solemn fact is that no possible 
warrant can justify such departure from simple 
humility before God. 

HUMILITY BEFORE GOD AN ABSOLUTE DUTY. 

L(^t US hear what we may, or think what we 
may, our place remains the same, that of humble 
confidence. God is Infinite King and Father ; 
and loyalty of trust and love is our absolute, our 
eternal, duty. What we can have of this, is our 
whole concern ; what we cannot have, we can mend 
only by what we have, protesting to God with all 
our might our utmost belief, and with our equal 
might praying and trusting him to help our unbe- 
lief. This is that fear of the Lord which is the 
beginning of wisdom, and that faith in God which 
is the perfection of wisdom. 

FIDELITY BEFORE ORTHODOXY. 

It may seem difficult to reconcile Scripture and 
Christ with this, but not for that are we warranted 
in plunging into the bog of a still greater difficulty, 
that in which Dr. Barnes, as we have seen, con- 
fesses that he had floundered, without hope or help, 
all his days — the difficulty of making our interpre- 



36 THE QUESTION OF HELL, 

tation consistent with the faith and practice of jus- 
tice^ mercy^ and humble reliance on God. If we 
cannot arrive at both a true fidelity and an ortho- 
dox belief;, we must defer the latter rather than the 
former^ until by fidelity we grov/ up unto faith^ 
according to the method of coming to know the 
doctrine^ by doing the will. 

Custom is the other way, in consequence of the 
perverse conceit with which men take hold of the 
matter. But we must be born again from custom 
and conceit, in order to reach our place as children 
of God, which is not that of exegetes, or dogma- 
tists, or ecclesiastics, but that of humility, of loyal- 
ty, of trust, devotion, and obedience. 

FILIAL FAITH IMPERATIVE. 

The method of thrusting Bible and Christ be- 
tween the soul and God, and of fixing selfish inter- 
est 'on these, as means of our redemption, has 
profoundly disturbed the natural order of religious 
experience. No means of grace, no agent of divine 
power, no person even of Godhead, can properly cut 
off our souls from the Infinite Fount, or rightly 
intercept our filial trust. 

It is better that we wholly confine our attention 
to Jesus teaching his disciples to pray, than that 
we permit ourselves to wander from this pattern of 



THE qUESlION OF HELL, 37 

simple dependence on God Our Father^ simple sub- 
mission to him^ and childlike trust in his care. 

NO REAL NEED OF MUCH DOGMA, 

We ought continually to think how apostles 
even had to be brought back, as when a little child 
was set in their midst to be a lesson to them of the 
right method of faith ; and how inevitably the 
pride of opinion has carried belief into far too much 
dogma, and along paths of questionable and use- 
less interpretation. 

Suppose that we cannot read the Bible aright 
in all its parts, and cannot justly weigh the prob- 
lems which are become a jungle of theories about 
the person of Jesus. We can at least wait on the 
spirit and providence of Grod for guidance in the 
matter, and meanwhile attend with all our might 
to the simpler, yet not smaller, nor less significant 
task, of doing justly, loving mercy, and walking 
humbly v/ith God after the instruction of Jesus in 
the " Our Father.'' And if to us so occupied there 
come any wild heathen fear that the Father will 
murder the children that cry unto him in simple 
trust, we can say to such fear, even if it wear the 
mask and boast the dignities of a theological sys- 
tem, Get thee behind me SATAN. 

FAITH IN UNIVERSAL PURIFICATION IS CHRISTIA:Nr. 

To apply this view to what Mr. Constable tells 



38 THE QUESTION 01 HELL, 

US that Origeu taught of the fate of souls, we need 
but mark the terms of the teaching in question, as 
these are put by Mr. Constable. It '^ sends men 
and Devils forth from purgatorial hell purified and 
humbled to ihd feet of the Great Father." We 
omit the mention of ^' restoration to Grod's favor 
and eternal happiness/' as not part of the main 
point of the theory. That ^omt is candidly ex- 
pressed in the words just quoted ; and we presume 
no one can question that filial fear of God must 
rejoice to think of the possibility that all the evil 
shall be made good. It may not be necessary to 
humble trust in God to assume that this will be 
80, but such trust can hardly help looking forward 
to it with very considerable, if not with very strong 
faith. And the fact actually is, that simple faith 
in God very commonly grows into a good degree of 
expectation that all souls will be purified and hum- 
bled by all discipline, hero or hereafter, and so 
made true children of God. 

DOGMATIC HORROR OF REDEMPTION. 

Mr. Constable is very far indeed from having 
this faith ; for he breathes fury almost against the 
large hope to which it leads. Thus he says : 

"This view would, we firmly believe, if commonly be- 
lieved, in a single generation reduce the morals of the world 
to a level with those of Sodom." 



THE QUESTION OF HELL. 3r> 

Again he says : 

** In Origin's view of the future, a view now fast spread- 
ing, we see the real cause of the emphatic, repeated, awful 
declarations of the eternity of future punishment. That view, 
so pleasing to fallen human nature, was the view against 
which the Spirit of God laid down in Scripture the warnings 
of everlasting destruction, of unquenchable fire. Experience 
has proved the necessity of this. Even in the face of tliese 
Scriptures men are found to advocate the hope of a restora- 
tion from hell. Far more than Augustine's theory does the 
view here maintained root out this false delusive hope. So 
long as men believe that life is not extinguished in hell, so 
long they will nourish hope. They will cherish the idea that 
somewhere down through the ages, when the groans of hell 
have been beating sadly, ceaselessly, at the gates of heaven, 
the message of mercy and deliverance may again be sent 
down, even as God used to send it of old to Israel groaning 
beneath the bondage of Egypt, Philistia, and Canaan. Death 
extirpates all such hopes. ' Corruption has a hope of a kind 
of removal, hut death has everlasting ruin,''''' — p. 35. 

Mr. Constable knows a great deal too much of 
the purpose and meaning of Scripture. The lan- 
guage ^^ emphatic, repeated, awful declarations of 
the etcrnitij of future j)unishment/' is his own pri- 
vate invention. But if such a text were in Scrip- 
ture, it w^ould yet become us to pause before it, 
and by no means to look through it into bottomless 
horror. Mr. Constable advances a rather crazy 
opinion when he tells us that faith in the divine 
recovery of all souls to obedience, would in a sin- 
gle generation reduce the morals of the w^orld to a 
le.vel with those of Sodom. Frantic exclamation 
of this sort shows a habit of mind the very oj^po- 
♦site to that of faith. To call it infidelity would 



10 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

m 

be harsh, and yet it has the tone of desperate un- 
belief. 

INFIDELITY OF DOGMA. 

What a lack of faith in man^ to assume that 
but for the fear of hell we should have Sodom at 
once ! What frightful douht of God's control^ to 
suppose that it hangs on human opinion on this 
subject ! But no sane man reallvhas this lack of 
faith in man and in God. It is without stopping 
to think, and out of a wild fervor of mere feeling, 
that Mr. Constable says that he ^^ firmly believes." 
It is an orthodox exclamation, not a Christian con- 
fession. 

NO ASSURANCE OF HELL NEEDED. 

Mr. Constable is aware that a hopeful view of 
future existence is ^^ now last spreading/' He ad- 
mits that ^^ men are found to advocate a restoration 
from hell.'' Indeed, he candidly avows that this 
must be so ; that, so long as the lost continue to 
exist, some one will nourish liope for them. And 
he claims it as a grand merit of his theorj^ that it 
cuts off such trusting hope, as no other theory 
does. Here again he runs before he is sent. The 
children of God do not require insurance against 
the redemption of the lost. 

AN INFINITE OPEN HOPE. 

On the contrary, they do require an infinite open 



THE QUESTION OF HELL. 41 

hope. They may fear the worst on many grounds, 
and may really liojie and believe only where their 
affections are engaged, or after they have reached 
a profound knowledge of faitli working by love, 
but in no case do they require, or should they per- 
mit, hope to be closed and trust to be cut off. 
When, therefore, Mr. Constable, or any other dog- 
matist, undertakes to put everlasting ruin at the 
end of faith's prospect of the destiny of all souls, 
he does exactly the wrong thing. If the books of 
hope are ever closed, it will be by no hand other 
than that oi final divine purpose. Anticipation of 
that purpose is contrary to the law of Christian 
faith. 

DOGMATIC RAGE. 

Origen's handling of Scripture excites the ire 
and scorn of Mr. Constable, as the following sen- 
tences will show : 

** Origen never found any difficulty in Scripture. If it was 
for him, well and good [f it was against him, he made it 
without any ceremony speak as he wished." 

*' Every reader of Scripture knows that its solemn warn- 
ings are addressed to the sinner in person: ' loicked man^ thou 
shalt surdy die.'' Death, Destruction, Perdition, Loss of Life 
— all the multiplied phrases and illustrations of the Bible are 
there directed against the persons of the wicked. Origen's 
simple mode of neutralizing their force is by directing them 
against their sin And so his point is gained. Their force 
cannot be too strong for him, so he does not attempt to di- 
minish it. The Angus tinian, directing them against the sin- 
ner, robs them of their meaning : Origen directing them 
against the sin, leaves them their proper sense. Both pervert 



42 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

Scripture, and it is difficult to say against whicli the charge 
is tlie heaviest. 

We meet with Origen's free and easy method of Scripture 
everywliere throughout his writings. Whatever be our opin- 
ion of Origen personally, of his learning, his brilliancy, even 
of the truth of much of his teaching, his teaching here places 
him among those prophets condemned by Ezekiel for 
' strengthening the hands of the wicked, that he should not 
return from his wicked way, hy promising him life.^^ — p. 62. 

INADVERTENT FALSEHOOD. 

The last word of this quotation is one of those 
inadvertent untruths which crowd the history of 
theoloo-ical controversv. Neither Orio-en, nor Ori- 
gen's hopeful theory, aim in the slightest degree to 
strengthen the hands of the wricked, that he should 
not return from his wicked way. The sole aim of 
this theory is to strengthen right, and bring man 
back to Grod. To threaten severe, - sin-crushino: 
discipline, with the minatory promise that it will 
be insisted on to the bitter end, and made as ef- 
fectual as the very furnace of fire is to gold in the 
refiner's hands, is the exact opposite of giving aid 
and comfort to the wicked. 

PURGATION THE TRUE SEVERITY. 

The reaction against violent orthodoxy has per- 
haps worn an appearance of getting the sinner off, 
of rescuing him from penalty, of breaking down 
the tremendous severities of discipline^ but this is 
no part of a wise hope in the redemptive efficacy 
of the divine justice. On the contrary, such a 



THE QUESIIOJST OF HELL. 43 

liope^ held with humility not less than confidence, 
nffords the best possible ground on which to build 
a thorough^ irresistible doctrine of the divine se- 
verity against sin. It has no appearance of injus- 
tice^ yet lacks no rigor of infinite regard for law, 
iiince it at once asserts law effectually over all the 
disobedient, and makes this assertion a perfect 
moral benefit to the sufferer, as well as to creature 
society in general. If searching rebuke of sin is 
to come back to our pulpits, it must be when the 
stroke of severity is at once weighted and steadied 
by the certainty that we may justly have good 
hope of the j^erfect, the universal and absolute, 
efficiency of the divine discipline. 

ETERNAL DEATH TO SIN. 

It is wholly untrue, then, that hope promises 
life to the wicked, that he should not return from 
his wicked way. It promises death rather, and a 
death more significant and effectual than extinc- 
tion. Our spirits can resist torment, especially 
when we distinctly anticipate a final end of pain. 
Milton obeyed a just instinct in making the cour- 
age and greatness of Satan more than a match, in 
a moral point of view, for the wrath of Jehovah. 
It is a petty and vulgar justice which deals in vin- 
dictive torment, and against such a justice even the 
breast of mortal man is triply armed. And if such 



44 THE QUESTION- 01 HELL, 

a justice jyroposes to kill as well as to injure, it is 
not very difficult for the creature to accept the 
chance, and make the most of its defeat of God. 
It will at least have an end, extinction, and he that 
tortures and kills will make nothing out of it, un- 
less it be a pleasure in vv^orking torment, which 
hardly a devil would be so devilish as to take. 

But death to desires, to j^urposes, to that in our 
very nature which works evil, is a visitation worthy 
the name of death. Not only is it a death which 
avenges law upon us and in us, but it is a death 
which steals uj^on our false choice, our wrong will^ 
our darkened thought, with terrors whose' hue is 
indeed that of eternity. 

NOT THE TEXTS BUT THE FAITH. 

Mr. Constable thinks it a free and easy method 
which the advocate of hope uses in his handling of 
Scripture. It may bo so, but it is at least the 
method of faith. We are not required to digest 
the jiromiscuous letter of Scrii^ture. On the con- 
trary, we are free to take and eat as we can, ac- 
cordinging to our taith, never going against faith 
merely to swallow a text. Some of us may under- 
stand much, and some of us may understand very 
little, of Scripture ; that does not so much matter, 
if, BO far as we go, we keep the rule of faith. 



TUE QUESTION OF HELL, 45 

IN SPIRIT AND TRUTH. 

We cannot keep two rules at once ; we cannot 
serve the spirit and yet be slaves to the letter. If 
we bind ourselves to the letter then we must stand 
largely free from the spirit ; while if we bind our- 
selves to the spirit we must stand largely free from 
the texts, until we learn how to see tlie spirit in 
them. Common orthodox service is in the letter, 
but the truer Christian service is in spirit and in 
truth. So it must be easy for faith to evade the 
text, not by denial, but by patient expectation of 
a new light in it. And Christianity especially se- 
cures to us the fullest freedom to confine our wor- 
ship to spirit and truth in the inner man. Dog- 
matists who thrust upon us either this mountain, 
or that, offend against the distinctive character of 
Christian doctrine. To all their systems faith 
says, ^^ Be ye taken up, and be ye cast into the 
depths of the sea," and it shall he done, 

ORTHODOXY A HUMAN INVENTION. 

Mr. Constable is unsparing in his criticism of the 
way in which the current orthodoxy makes out its 
case. One of his exclamatory statements, intrin- 
sically worthless as it is, will yet serve as a sugges- 
tion to our reflections upon the intellectual condi- 
tion of the average orthodox mind. It is as 
follows : 



46 THE Q UES TION OF HELL, 

** Ah ! may we not well enquire whether the Church of 
to-day is not, like the Pharisees of old, * teaching for doc- 
trines the commandments of men ?' " 

As Mr. Constable makes this enquiry, it amountsi 
only to an exaggerated expression of his hostility ; 
to hell with a dum rather than hell with a dee. In 
itself^ however, and on broad general grounds, the 
question is one which forces itself upon Christian 
attention. The long career of orthodoxy. Catholic 
or Protestant, has borne fruits which compel faith 
to precisely this inquiry, whether men have not 
put their own notions in place of the divine word ? 
And takinsc the verdict of each class of believers 
separately, we find the opinion universal that this 
has been done. 

HEADY HUMAN OPINION. 

No sect accuses itself, but every one accuses an- 
other, with a degree of judgment which is itself 
manifestly contrary to faith. The Catholics ex- 
clude all Protestants, as no better than aliens and 
infidels, and support their exclusion by a majority 
vote of Christendom. The Protestants in their 
turn exclude the Catholics, and sustain their judg- 
ment ])y the undoubted weight of the more intel- 
licrent class of believers. Amon^^ Protestants 
every sect without exception lies under the ban of 
other sects on some grave point of faith and prac- 



THE QUESTION OF HELL, 47 

tice^ to the extent of actually being voted down by 
a majority of Protestants on the point or points 
which it individually cherishes. 

Thus it is the common charge everywhere that 
human notions have intruded upon divine truth. 
And the spirit of this charge is, to a very large cx- 
tentj a spirit of anxious superstition^ of intense 
self-will, no more Christian than a similar spirit 
among heathen. Men act as if they Avere afraid 
God would kill them if they exercised charity, and 
they push their objections to their brethren with a 
heat which has far more assertion of will in it than 
love of truth, of man, or of God. 

BAD llEPUTE OF ORTHODOXY. 

The brand on all the theologies of Christendom 
is '^ odium tlieologicum f^ the just reflection of 
mankind is, ^' How these dogmatists hate one an- 
other ! '' And with such an appearance it is fair to 
presume that there has been, to some degree, and 
however unwittingly and innocently, a comprehen- 
sive 'teaching for doctrines the commandments of 
men." 

'^ Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees,"' and 
" Get thee behind me,'' and similar short and sharp 
methods with the tendency to this very mistake, 
were necessary in the beginning, and seem not less 
necessary now. Nor can it surprise us, when we 



48 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

reflect how nearly impossible simplicity of alle- 
giance, by justice, and mercy, and humble trust, is, 
and how natural it is to want some great place, 
even of penitence and humility, and some conspic- 
uous ground and lofty standing, even though it be 
for shame and j)unishment, or for redemption by 
rescue out of the very burnings of wrath. 

ORTHODOX LOUDNESS AND DIVINE SILENCE. 

The dogmatic mind swells with a sense of the 
spectacular importance of- sin, and punishment, 
and atonement, and sniffs at the thought of a silent 
operation of God with his creatures, and of a quiet 
return of the soul to holiness and heaven. It is 
not in any of the great theologies that the spirit 
bloweth as it listeth, or that God comes to the 
heart of man with still small voice. Neither 
Catholicism, nor Calvinism, nor Methodism, nor 
Unitarianism, will ever have it said of its mean- 
ing, '^ Thou canst not tell whence it comeih nor 
whither it goeth.'' If there were not a Christian- 
ity which doth not cry in the creeds, and a Christ 
whose voice is not heard in the j)roof texts, and a 
povv^er of God working ia us above all that we ask 
or profess, all that we think or pretend, it would 
be to little purpose to prefer the Christian name 
to a heathen, or to imagine that religion has en- 
during and redeeming power. 



THE QUESTION OF HELL, 49 

SURVIVAL OF HEATHEN' METHOD AND FAITH. 

On very broad grounds, then, we tliink it very 
pertinent to inquire ^^ whether the churcii of to- 
day is not, like the Pharisees of old, ^teaching for 
doctrines the commandments of men ;' '^ and of 
heathen men at that. The result of such an in- 
quiry would bear very materially upon the solution 
of the problems brought before us in Mr. Consta- 
ble's pamphlet, since it seems highly j)robable that 
the blackness of darkness which rests upon the or- 
thodox solution of those problems, is directly due 
to a survival of heathen methods and beliefs, and 
since also we may reasonably surmise that even 
Mr. Constable's variation of the doctrine of perdi- 
tion has no warrant beyond the same shadow of 
heathen terror and heathen opinion. 

FEEBLE ^VITNESS OF BIBLE TO HELL. 

Mr. Constable takes in hand the orthodox ap- 
peal to the Bible, with as little reserve as if he had 
not lately held an orthodox view himself. It 
would be interesting to know how commonly 
preachers of the eternity of future misery meet 
the difficulty described in the following : 

'* Has it never occurred to the reader, as to myself, when 
searching for biblical language in which to present and en- 
force the eternity of future suffering, to be surprised and 
puzzled to observe how unsatisfactory and feeble seem all the 
Apostolic references to future unending woe ? " 



50 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

THE BIBLE DOES NOT CUT OFF HOPE. 

Mr. Constable catches but a glimpse of a very 
large and very significant fact, enougli for his 
small purpose of shilting the stage scenery of hell, 
but not enough for securing a just view of the mo- 
mentous topic under discussion. That fact is 
that we have no firm ground in either evangelist or 
apostle for cutting off* the operation of Christian 
faith^ in the case of the lost, and hence are not 
warranted in doiug this. 

NO DEMONSTRATION OF HELL. 

Faith issues in hope at least, if not in trust, or 
even in the perfect love whose covenant cannot be 
broken, and only the strongest demonstration could 
stop this action of faith. Such demonstration 
does not exist. Whatever does exist is simply 
matter for reserved inquiry^ without perplexity, 
least of all doubt and despair. If we cannot dis- 
pose of it we can at least let it alone, and go about 
the business of faith, trusting that by doing wliat 
is practical we shall in due time wholly under- 
stand. 

The case which Mr. Constable finds feeble and 
unsatisfactory, was never meant to be anything 
else, and even the case which Mr. Constable sticks 
in, tliat of his own idea of hell, would seem no 



THE QUESTION^ OF IxELL. 51 

less weak and unimportant, if due heed were paid 
to the point of view of pure and simple faith, 

A ^^ BASELESS AND HORRID CREED." 

It is easy for Mr. Constable to see how foolishly 
the orthodox mind falls into the ditch of a ^'base- 
less and horrid creed.'' For example, the follow- 
ing are some of his sentences : 

'' The ordinary Greek Lexicon, not lexicons of the New 
Testament, colored and tainted by theological opinion, is the 
true guide to the Greek of the New Testament. —p. 14. . . 

. . Dictionaries of the New Testament, and commenta- 
tors on it, may, if they please, put upon the phrase the sense 
of ' happiness' in the numberless passages where it occurs, but 
we deny lo them the right to alter the meaning of a well un- 
derstood Grecian word for the sake of bolsterirg up their 

baseless and horrid creed. — p. 16 That is what 

the holders of Augustine's theory have done. They put an 
insufficient, and inapposite, an unnatural, or a positively false 
meaning on the most important ternis of the New Testament. 
With them death means life, and life means happiness, and 
so on. Having put these convenient meanings on the phrase- 
ology of Scripture, interpreted as they would not dare to 
interpret the code of a human legislator, they can look placidly 
on a thousand passages which contradict what they teach 
from platform, and pulpit, and press, and instil into children's 
minds almost wiUi their mother's milk." — p. 59. 

"We now come to the famous passages in the Book of 
Revelation. Diiven hopelessly from the plainer parts of 
Scripture, the advocates of eternal life in hell think that they 
have in this obscure, mysterious, and highly-wrought figura- 
tive book, at least two passages which authorize them to change 
numberless passages in the rest of Scripture, and some even 
in the Book of Eevelation itself, from their plain and obvi- 
ous meaning to one that is forced, unnatural, and often false 
to all the laws of the interpretation of language," — p. 30. 

HOW TO BOLSTER UP HEATHENISM. 

If Mr. Constable unwittingly held, or deliber- 



52 1IIE QUESTION OF HELL, 

ately held^ not long since, a baseless and horrid 
theological opinion ; if he did this by altering the 
meaning of well understood words, and by putting 
a. positively false meaning on most imj)ortant proof- 
texts ; if he dared to interpret the Bible any way 
and every way to suit the exigencies of a heathen 
dogma^ — and all this he brings against his recent 
self and his orthodox brethren, — we may well as- 
sume that the method which leads to such results 
is a very doubtful one. 

THE SACRIFICE OF TRUTH AKD RIGHT. 

Oiir own observation had prepared us for Mr. 
Constable's confession of orthodox want of verac- 
ity and exegetical rectitude. It seems quite right 
to the orthodox mind to accept as from God a hor- 
rid opinion, however baseless simple faith may find 
it. The idea is that by so doing the mind makes 
a suitable sacrifice to Grod. And who is to tell the 
deluded worshipper, that every such sacrifice is es- 
sentially heathen. 

SERVING GOD WITH LYING LIPS. 

The heathen habit of mind, panic fear before 
God, and the heathen opinion, that God demands 
the flow of blood, figurative if not literal, some 
sacrifice of the best, remain in full vigor with the 
average orthodox pietist. And with God looking 
on to damn him if he flinch or fail, why should he 



THE QUESTION OE HELL. 53 

not hustle texts into any convenient form, regard- 
less of their individual significance, and only at- 
tentive to the exigencies of his sacrifice ? Is a 
man to heed the probable individual 2:)urpose of a 
verse of Scripture, when, if ho should be misguided 
by evident appearances, he may have to go to hell 
for his blander ? Is he not more likelv, imder the 
influence of fear and of concern for self, to make a 
safe use of a text, rather than an apparently true 
one ? What is the apj^earance of truth but that 
reflection of reason which superstition delights to 
sacrifice ? The common plea to this day of aver- 
age orthodoxy is that we should bow reason to 
God, and that it is safest to see God in the dogma 
which Mr. Constable has found courage to call 
baseless and horrid. 

HOPELESS d'ISHONESTY OF ORTHODOXY. 

So long therefore as concern for safety is the first 
motive to religion, and the opinion that God is 
pleased with anything but truth and right holds 
full sway, so long will pietists twist evident facts 
to support horrid opinions. Mr. Constable him- 
self is not yet out of the meshes of this false and 
selfish method. 

THE PRACTICAL FAILURE OF HELL. 

The practical failure of the doctrine of hell is 
sketched by Mr. Constable in the following terms : 



54 THE QUESTION OF HELL, 

" It has often beeu remarked that where a punishment felt 
to be excessive is threatened, — it wliolly fails of its effect. 
The criminal is satisfied that it will not be executed. It is 
thus with the theory of everlasting misery as a punishment 
for human sin. It is practically disbelieved. The sinner takes 
refuge from it in a thousand ways. The greater portion of 
the professing Christian Church has adopted purgatory as an 
escape for them from this hell. Even for those Avho cannot 
accept a purgatory the vulgar notion of hell has no practical 
terrors. Even if they do not reject it altogether as a mere 
bugbear, they do not believe in it fo7^ themselves. A change of 
life, a word of penitence at the last, a sigh of sorrow for the 
past as the soul is leaving its tabernacle, will surely avert 
from iheni a fate too terrible for a merciful God to inflict 
And so the very transcendent terrors of the vulgar hell defeat 
the object of threatened penalty, for few, if any, believe in 
its infliction on themselves.''^ — p, 64 

FAITH CASTS OUT FEAR. 

It is a significant illustration of the doom of the 
dogmatist to blindness of mind^ that Mr. Consta- 
ble does not see that every word of this tells just as 
forcibly against one sort of eternal jDerdition as an- 
other. Does Mr. Constable supj30se that "the 
greater portion of the Christian Church'' will be so 
pleased at the idea of burning people all up in 
hell, as to give up a hope of purgatorial discipline, 
and that too wdien this hope is in the strictest anal- 
ogy with simple faith? Or is it to be presumed that 
the great mass of unbelievers, who put aside the 
common idea of hell, on various grounds, will not 
just as readily evade any other idea of terrible 
damnation ? It does not rob perdition of all its 
terrors to make it a death of the soul after a season. 



IHE QUESTION OF HELL, 55 

of torment. This also is too incredible to be prac- 
tically believed by any one who would not believe 
the orthodox notion. Timid pietists will creep 
away from the shadow of either terror ; venture- 
some doubt will face either exactly alike ; while 
clear faith knows no more of the one horror than of 
the other. 

ORTHODOX TEACHING STIGMATIZED. 

Mr. Constable uses great vigor and courage in 
his denial of the orthodox theory of hell. He 
says: '^ We abhor Augustine's theory." He 
speaks of the arguments used in its support as 
'^ arguments which we feel unworthy of a child." 
The course which it ascribes to Grod he denounces 
as a ^^ procedure which our heart whispers to us 
is only worthy of hell.'' He stigmatizes the or- 
thodox teaching of Augustine on the subject as 
^^ Semi-Manichaeism." and pronounces it '^ at di- 
rect issue wdth the authority of Scripture." He 
declares that ^^ the theory of eternal life in hell 
contradicts the whole tenor of the Bible." Speak- 
ing of those who ^^ sinned without law/' he says 
that ^^ Augustine's sentence against such is one of 
the blackest tyranny and injustice." The idea 
that all souls are immortal has, he asserts, ^^ led 
good men, under the specious pretext of exhibit- 
ing the Divine justice and holiness as infinite, to 



56 THE Q UESTION OF HELL, 

paint God as a monster of unutterable cruelty." 

A SPECIOUS PRETEXT. 

For a confession from the bosom of orthodoxy 
this is surprisingly exact. The last sentence just 
quoted touches the quick of the orthodox argu- 
ment. The plea for hell in orthodox dogmatism 
is indeed based on the ^^ specious f)retext of ex- 
hibiting the Divine justice and holiness." It is a 
mere pretext. No man^ directly anxious to honor 
the justice and holiness of God, will turn his mind 
to the damnation of other people as a means there- 
to. He may leave himself in the hands of God, 
for better or for worse ; and he will do so rather 
than make it his first business to find some means 
of escape from the Divine discipline. 

SIMPLE SUBMISSION ALONE HONORS GOD. 

If the soul awakened to desire the glory of 
God, and moved to faith in him, seems to itself 
worthy of hell, it will say so submissively, and 
leave the matter entirely to God. If redemption 
comes to such a soul, it will come of the free grace 
of God, not through any scheme of begging off 
and paying up and getting quit, either with or 
without intervention of a second parfy. To set 
the soul upon pushing its part in any such scheme, 
as if loyalty to God could be shown by concern 



"LHE QUESTION OF HELj.. 57 

for one's own safety, and it were honor enough to 
God to let us off, on the basis of a good scheme, is 
absurdly contrary to a just idea of regard for the 
character of Deity. If we honestly desire honor 
to the Divine justice and lioliness, we have no 
choice but to submit ourselves absohitely, trusting 
that God cannot do wrong, not even to a sinner, 
and Aviliing that he should do right, though he 
slay us. 

THE ORTHODOX SCHEME NO HONOR TO GOD. 

The theory, therefore, which affects -to honor 
God by according to him the right to inflict the 
pains of hell, i^rovided that we may in good time 
dodge the infliction, has no rectitude or veracity in 
it ; it is a trick of human conceit and selfishness, 
as mere a pretext as ever superstition suggested to 
the mind of man. Any sincere mind, once brought 
round from the orthodox to the Christian point of 
view, from selfish fear to unselfish faith, wdll see 
this without difficulty. It is remarkable that Mr. 
Constable should see it while still holding on to a 
modified orthodoxy. 

A PEDIGREE OF DISHONOR. 

In disposing of the orthodox dogma of hell, 
Mr. Constable looks up its historical appearance 
On this point he remarks : 



58 THE Q UES TION OF HELL, 

" Tlie first known holder of the theory of eternal life for 
the reprobate was the author of the writinrjs known under 
the tilie of * Clementina,' and falsely attributed to Clemens 

Romanus This nameless forger is, so far as is 

known, the first maintainer of the doctrine of eternal life 
in hell. . . Here in these shameless forgeries, and these 
vagaries of unhallowed fanc3^ lies the mea.n origin of a dog- 
ma which now overshadows the Christian Church. 



a 



unhallowed" AND ^^ SHAMELESS.*" 



We need not pause to weigh the historical value 
of this statement. It is sufficient to consider its 
significance as a confession. The author of it is 
in full sympathy vvith the dogmatic system of or- 
thodoxy, except on the one point of the duration 
and nature of future punishment. He r^sts his 
faith on Scripture alone, and he shrinks with hor- 
ror from any really liberal conception of dealing 
with sin. In fact he thinks his notion of hell 
more terribly effective than any other. He thinks 
that he believes that v^e should have universal 
Sodom within one generation if the fear of hell 
were removed. There is no liberal taint in ]iis 
jnetism. He has simply hit upon a particular in- 
terpretation of sacred texts, and he pushes this 
with precisely the average dogmatic spirit. As 
near as possible, therefore, lie is a witness from the 
midst of orthodoxy. And the ability, dignity, and 
learning with which he writes, assure us that he 
is more than a common witness. When then he 



THE QUESTION OF HELL. 59 

tells us that vagaries of unhallowed iancy, dis- 
guised in shameless forgeries, were the origin of a 
doctrine which now overshadows, and which for 
more than fifteen hundred years has overshadowed, 
the Christian Church, w^e may very properly re- 
gard so damaging a statement as a grave additional 
reason for pushing from us the Avhole structure of 
orthodox dogmatism, and for resting in the simple 
faith and practice of Christian principles. The 
mere possibility that such a thing has happened, 
through excess of human opinion in Christian the- 
ology, should send us back to the simplest faith. 

THE SHAME UNDENIABLE. 

We are born under a vast dogmatic system ; ed- 
ucation and custom press it upon us ; persuasion 
and persecution hold us back from going out of it; 
and, behold, a credible witness, who has no hostile 
motive, who wishes only a slight readjustment of a 
single conception, breaks oat with the declaration 
that the conception which he washes to displace 
was the invention of unhallovv^ed fancy, and was 
originally palmed upon the church by a sbameless^ 
forger. Can an indignant church reply, not 
merely that it was not so in this case, but that it 
could not have been so ? Alas for a Church which 
certainly cannot so reply, and to which no candid 
scholar can give credit in such a matter without go- 



60 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

ing into court, and hearing unquestioned evidence. 
And when ail the evidence is heard, we fear that it 
will only show to what an enormous extent the au- 
tlioritative dogmas of Christendom are an in- 
trusion and a fraud upon Christian faith. 

HORRID FEATURES OF THE DOGMA OF HELL. 

That Mr. Constable, once able to stand back 
from the dogma of eternal torture of souls, and to 
take in all its hideous aspects, regards it as an out- 
rage upon every humane and godly instinct of ra- 
tional man, is made very plain in the following 
vigorous statement : 

"What is our question y It is this. Is pain, inflicted 
through eternity, endured without any hope of an end, no 
nearer to its close when numberless cycles have passed than 
when the first groan was uttered, — is such a jusi punislimeni 
for any conceivable amount of Sin committed by the worst of 
men ? Man did not ask for life : it wa^ given him without 
his knowledge or consent. Can any abuse of this unasked- 
for gift justify the recompense of an existence spent in un- 
ending agony ? 

" Wc must put the question on its proper grounds. The 
ablest m.odern defenders of eternal life in hell have put it on 
a false issue. They have done so in two main respects, urged 
on by their inability to justify their theory in its naked light. 
The first of these we will give in the words of William 
Archer Butler, whose view is adopted by Dr. Salmon, Pro 
fessor Mansel, and others. ' The pimlshments of hell,'' says 
Butler, • are but the perpetual vengeance that accompanies 
the sins of hell, An eternity of wickedness brings with it an 
eternity of woe. The sinner is to suffer for everlasting, but 
it is because the sin itself iscis everlastiiig as the suffering,'' 

**It may fairly be questioned whether, according to any prin- 
ciples of Divine or human law, the lost in hell are capable of 
sinning. We do not believe they are. Out of and beyond all 



THE QUESTION 01 HELL. 61 

law, they are incapable of transgressing law. But indcpend- 
ent!y of this, it is sullicicnt to say of the above fearful view 
that it contradicts the Scriptures. Not once oi' twice, but 
over and over again, it tells us that the punishment of the future 
is for the sins of the present times. If we think it too great, we 
are not at liberty to throw in the sins of the future, real or 
imaginary, to justify the puuishment of the future. If we 
cannot defend man's future treatment as being a just award 
for his present conduct, we cannot justify it at ail. It is a 
piece of the coolest effrontery for us to present as a reason 
for God's conduct what God has not Himself presented when 
explaining to man His judicial conduct. Just fancy an earthly 
judge sentencing a criminal to a punishment too severe for the 
offense committed, and then gravely justifying bis sentence 
by the observation that the criminal would be sure to deserve it 
atl by his conduct in gaol ! Yet such is tlie judicature, unwor- 
thy of a Jeffreys, wliich learned professors of theology and 
doctors of divinity ascribe to the Judge of the whole earth ! 

'' Nor does it relieve God in the smallest measure from the 
charge of injustice to say that future punishment will but 
.follow that law of nature which inextricably links together 
sin and misery. The laws of nature are the laws of God. 
For all their consequences, after they have worked their uni- 
form work for ages, He is just as responsible as when He first 
ordained them, or as when Pie departs from them by an alter- 
ation of law or a miraculous interference. So Bishop Butler 
argues in the place above referred to. If the laws of nature 
were to bring on the sinner a punishment greater than his 
sin deserved, it is God Plimself who would be doing so. 

*' The simple question then is, could man by any conduct 
here deserve to suffer throughout eternity pain and torment 
to which only the worst pain he suffers here can aflord a true 
parallel ? Would the agonies to which the martyr was sub- 
jected for an hour be only sufficient for the sinner if drawn 
out through the eternal age ? Would it be just in God to in- 
flict this on any single creature of his hand, on any being 
who would never have had life at all if the Maker had not 
called him from his clay ? The verdict of the human heart 
— in its fierce denial — in its secret recoil — answers No. 
' Eternal pain,' says Augustine, ' seems harsh and unjust to 
human sense.' ' With the majority of men of the world,* 
says Butler, ' this doctrine seems, when they think at all about 
it, monstrous, disproportioned, impossible.' It seems so, ia 
the same writer's mind, to others besides men of the worlds' 



62 THE QUESIION OF HELL. 

to men who do not fear this doom for themselves ; * it would 
blanch the intellect,' reduce the mind of the Christian to a 
state of idiotcy, deprive him of life weie he out ' adequately 
to conceive it.' If God were now to ask man whether his 
conduct on this hypothesis were just, man would with one 
voice reply that it was not. 

" The history of human religious thought shows man's inera- 
dicable sense of the burning wrong of tiiis fearful theor}-. If 
Plato, deriviug his inspiration from Egypt, taught a Tartarus 
with its fiery streams whence none could come forth, he 
taught it for an inlinitesimally small portion of men. For 
most — even for the homicide, the parricide, and the matri- 
cide — he had his Acherusian Lake, whence, after a purgative 
process, they issued forth again to the upper air. If Augus- 
tine adopted his great master's abode of unending pain, he 
adopted also his purgatory, from whence there was a way to 
heaven. If the Church of Rome has sanctioned the theory 
of Augustine, she practically holds out its terrors only to 
those without her pale of safety : for her own millions she 
has, at the worst, the fires of a finite period. The assertion 
of Augustine's hell did but drive the gentler mind of Origen 
to the notion of a wider purgatory than Rome's or Augus- 
tine's, where even devils sliould be prepared to resume their 
place in heaven. Tlie Churches of the Reformation have 
generally followed Augustine in his hell and denied his pur- 
• gatory, but at all times within their bosom has been a strug- 
gle against the dominant doctrine, and, even from those who 
maintained it, it has generally commanded only a .sullen, un- 
cheerf ul assent. Such men as Tillotson, Robert Hall, Isaak 
Ta3dor, Albert Barnes, while they accepted the theory, loved 
it not. lYe constantly find its recent defenders candidly 
confessing that with all their heart they would wish 
that it was a lie. The modern mind, shaken in reli- 
gious faith, denies the inspiration of a book which is 
supposed to teach the monstrous creed. With those who 
will not throw away their faith in mun's future, the 
theory of Origen, with all its consequences, bids fair, if only 
confronted with the fearful nightmare of Augustine, to take 
the place which the authority of the latter father has given 
to his views. The modern defenders of Augustine's theory 
shrink from putting forward a vindication of it in its plain 
and hideous aspect. One after another of the arguments on 
which it has heretofore been defended they have abandoned 
as unworthy of their reason, or abhorrent to their sense of 
justice." 



THE QUESTION OF HELL, 63 

**IIell ii not the eternal abode of evil, concentrated in in- 
tensity, deepening and darkenino: in hue throughout eternity. 
It is not tlie evcrhisting exhibitioa of a scene with whose 
moral horrors all the sensuality, and deviltry, and liate, and 
despair tiiat has been exhibited in earth's foulest dens could 
not compare, . . . Thank God, it is not true. God does 
not contemplate ilns hell. 

''The hell of Scripture is the very counterpart to that fearful 
scene which Augustine has depicted. The very thought of 
this latter is too horrible to think. However ancient, it is no 
part of ' the faith once delivered to the saints.' AVe therefore 
reject it as a fable, a novelty, a monstrous doctrine worthy of 
the Koran, w^liere it takes its fitting place — unworthy of the 
Gospel, wiiere it finds no place. We leave it to the disciple 
of Mohainmod, lying on his couch of sensuality, to look 
down with cru<^l delight upon a scene of unutterable and end- 
less misery. This is not the consummation which the disci- 
ples of Christ, or the w^orshippers of the Father of mercies 
are called on to rejoice in. Tiiey could not look on it and 
rejoice ; thev could not reorard pain as endless without feel- 
ing that unalloyed joy could never be their own." — pp. 65, ^^. 



HELL A MORAL IIOrvROIl. 

It is quite just to leave the exjoectation of hell 
to the most utterly sensual, or the most thoroughly- 
selfish of moral creatures. The dogma belongs in 
the lowest and basest types of religion. No de- 
cently moral nature can contemplate the merest 
chance of such a gathering into one of vile energies 
and detestable horrors without feeling unutterably 
moved to resist it, to overcome it, to suppress and 
exterminate it. People may well be shy of arguing 
for hell in clear and cool reason, apart from the 
heat of dogmatism, or the blindness of supersti- 
tion. Undoubtedly the mere j)rogress of virtue, 



G4 THE Q UES TION OF HELL. 

the most ordinary exj)erience of elevation of char- 
acter, is blotting out faith in the plague of eternal 
woe, and j)i*eparing the way of a distinctly con- 
trary doctrine. There is no authority which can 
long stand up against this irrepressible moral ad- 
vance of Christian mankind. If the Bible teaches 
the dogma of hell, faith will be thereby convinced 
that it is not the book which is divine, but the 
word of holy truth which the book may prove to 
contain. An inveterate divinity in every good 
man's heart forbids, as with the voice of indwell- 
ing God, the admission of the hateful doctrine into 
the holier place of the heart, where love dvvelleth ; 
nay more than this, decent human instinct keejDS 
it, like a leper, at a distance. The more souls 
grow into the likeness of Grod, the more they grow 
away from this looking for of poison and fire and 
all hell torment. 

THE PROTESTANT DOGMA WORSE THAN THE CATH- 
OLIC. 

It is something astonishing that the Protestant 
do2:ma should be so much harder and blacker than 
the Catholic. Perhaps it is chiefly due to the fact 
that Protestantism is really a bolder departure 
from living inspiration than Catholicism is. The 
latter possesses a respectable faith in the presence 
of deity in a general communion of mankind, 



THE QUESTIOJSr OF HELL. 05 

though it falsely limits this communion to her own 
mankind. Protestantism is a long way more ex- 
clusive and Pharisaic than the olderform of church 
and creed. She thanks God that none of her chil- 
dren are as other men are, while Rome uses the 
Christian rule far more thoroughly, and receives 
into her fold, not those who are already Christian, 
but all who are willing to come to her to be made 
Christian, If God does as well by his children as 
Rome by hers, then is no soul shut out from hope. 

BOTTOMLESS EVIL IMPOSSIBLE TX A MORAL UNI- 
VERSE. 

This is a true paternal as well as maternal in- 
stinct, to hold on to all, with courage and hope to 
recover all. The purging away of evil belongs in 
a just conception of discipline. No philosophy of 
the universe is so much as respectable w^hich does 
not lend to divine law this disciplinary efficacy. 
Right and wrong would cease to mean anything if 
we should once really apprehend a tide of uncon- 
trolled wrong setting forever towards a gulf of 
bottomless evil. Right is the way the divine law 
makes things go, and if it makes things go wrong, 
then is wrong right, and our philosophy is crazy. 
Crazy ! It would be hell itself to really know of 
hell, or adequately to conceive the horrors of per- 
dition. 



66 THE QUE 81 10 IT OF HELL. 

A THEOLOGICAL WHOPPER. 

■ God speaks conclusively in the breast of man to 
give the lie direct to all assertion of horrible tor- 
ture in the universe. If such were the effect of 
Grodhead working through natural law^ then were 
it better that unpitying force be our mother^ for 
this at least is not positively malignant, does not 
poison the wound as well as crush. Earth has 
never seen judgment such as the orthodox dogma 
ascribes to Grod ; to speak of it as based in jus- 
tice, this exceeding weight of horrible injury, 
which will never let up to all eternity, is truly a 
theological whopper. 

A WICKED PROPHECY. 

No wonder that the dogmatists are anxious to 
turn prophets, and to tell us what they know about 
the eternal future occupation of those who have 
not here found life. They bear down with great 
confidence on this point, the apparent certainty 
that souls once swallowed up of sin will go on sin- 
sing forever, and will only get the deserts of eternal 
sinning. Such prophecy is a crime, a blasphemy, 
a deep ungodliness and horrible infidelity. By it, 
if we venture it, we consent to the going on for- 
ever of wickedne-ss, and are really in an attitude to 
desire that this may be. We deny, also, in this 



THE QUESTION OE HELL. 6; 

vaticination^ the efficient control of God, tlie infi- 
nite persuasion of divine moral government, the 
just certainties of law and order in the universe. 
There is no unbelief so deej), so godless, so faithless^ 
so profane and mad, as that which says to the des- 
perate sinner, the outrageous wrong-doer, the 
hardened wretch, there is no effectual remedy of 
divine discipline, no ample restoration of injury, 
no perfect bringing to rights again, no insurance of 
good against evil ivJiich icill be paid, 

SUPREME DEITY IS SIF'KKME IlESPONSIBILITY. 

Not only have we been cast on this stream of 
existence without wisli or will of our own, but all 
the chief conditions of our career have been so far 
ordered that for nothing whatever can we be held 
alone responsible. There is no moment of creatiu'e 
existence without the finger of God, no incident or 
accident of man without the effectual jirovidence 
of the Divine Father. Neither in creating us with 
mind, nor in placing us under freedom, has Deity 
abrogated Godhead, the core of which is living 
law, and the necessity of which is the living con- 
trol, the spiritual subjection, of all things that 
are. 

FREE WILL CANNOT BAR GOD's WILL. 

If we do not see how to have this faith in God 
without a sacrifice of our notion of human free- 



68 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

dom, we must make the Christian choice, not the 
lieathen, and keep our faith whatever may become 
of our notion of free will. It is of no importance 
that we find out how the Lord works to will and 
io do ; it is only necessary to believe that he does, 
and to make that belief an integral part of our 
own devotion to the divine service. No more here 
than anywhere else is the speculative belief of any 
value without the practical doing going before and 
following after ; so that even the belief becomes 
the worst of lies if we make it mean that deity is 
dead fate, and that we have only to let all go as it 
will, without care or conscience of ours. It is the 
intimate union of divine j^^i'pose with human, of 
our working with Grod's, which Christian faith pro- 
claims to us on the part of the Divine Father, and 
demands from us as the Father's children. To set 
free will ajDart from Grod, and to make divine will 
fate irrespective of man, are alike contrary, the one 
to fidelity, and the other to trust, towards the 
Father in heaven. 

TERTULLIAN AND THE DOGMA OF HELL. 

The greatest early master of the dogma of eter- 
nal torture of souls was the African Latin Father, 
Tertullian, whom a candid history of the rise of 
orthodoxy will show to have been a heathen rhetor- 
ician still, in the Christian church, as well as bo- 



Jim Q uESTioisr of hell, go 

fore he was converted. TertuHIaiij as godfather to 
the intrusive diabolism of the dogma of hell, has 
become sufficiently hateful to Mr. Constable, now 
that his dogmatic motive is changed from damna- 
tion which lasts forever to that which burns out by 
burning everything up. Thus* he says of the pa- 
ternity of the orthodox view, and of its character : 

" In Atlienagoras, Tatian, and tlie writer of the spurious 
works attributed to Clemens liomauus, we have tlien the earli- 
est known advocates of the theory of eternal life in hell. But 
this theory required a more powerful advocate than any of 
the above writers, and it found it somewhat later in the per- 
son of Tertullian. A master of the Latin tongue, a powerful 
reasoner when not led away by his peculiar errors, of a vehe- 
ment nature and a vivid imagination, he was well suited to 
impress an idea on an age disposed to accept it, and, spile of 
his heresies, spite of his strange hallucinations, he left the 
lasting impression of his mind upon tlie church of succeeding 
times. He uses to their utmost possible latitude of meaning 
most of Plato's terms for the soul. It is, even in the case of 
the wicked, not subject to death, but must ever continue im- 
mortal. It is ever indissoluble, indivisible, an eternal sub- 
stance, having the very same immortality which belongs to 
Deity. But it is in the description of the endless agony of 
the lost that Tertullian surpassed his predecessors, and threw 
them into the shade. He does not draw any discreet veil over 
his scene of punishment. Without sa3ing that he took a 
positive delight in the contemplation of it, he depicts its fan- 
cied circumstances with a minuteness and a force that have 
only been surpassed by the imagination of a Dante, or the 
agonizing details of a Jesuit or a Redemptorist preacher. 
Nor can we say that he was wrong, "if his theory were but 
true. ISTo amount of terror, horror, disgust, that could pos- 
sibly be awakened here in the human mind could be too 
great, if only by it a single soul could be persuaded to fly in 
time from this wrath to come. The delicacy that tells iis'that 
there is such a hell, but tliat good manners, or regard for feel- 
ing, should lead us to conceal its naked and terrible aspect, is 
a false delicacy which risks eternity rather than give pain for 



70 THE QUESTION OE HELL. 

a moment. Tertullian certainly was not guilt^^ of this false 
delicacy. He believed in eternal torments, and' he drew faith- 
ful pictures of them. AYith him liell Avas a scene where end- 
less slaughtering (ceterna occisio) was being enacted, where 
the pain of d}' ing was to be ever felt, but never the relief 
which death could bring, for death according to him could .. 
not enter into that region of endless life. And God was the ' 
author and inflictor of this ! " | 



DIABOLISM OF TEKTULLIAN's DOGMA 



Mr. Constable continues : 

*' Let us look fairly and boldly at this. It was the root, 
and basis, and justjfication o I the theory of Origen. No man 
can deny that God is able to destroy what He was able to 
create. Ko man can deny that God li.d a power to choose 
whether He would inflict death upon the sinner or an endless 
life of agony. Which would He choose— the gentler or the 
more fearful doom ? Will you say the latter ? Why ? There 
must be a reason. Is it to please Himself? He repudiates 
wholly this kind of character ! His mode of dealing here 
contradicts it ; where pain is sharp it is short. Is it to please 
Ms angelic or redeemed creation ? They are too like himself 
to take pleasure in such a course. Did no pity visit the Crea- 
tor's bosom, they would look up into his face and plead for 
mercy. Is it to terrify them from sin ? Would it ? What is 
sin? Is it not pre-eminently alienation from God? What 
would alienate from Him so completely as the sight or the 
knowledge of such a hell as Tertullian taught ? P ty, horror, 
anguish, would invade eveiy celeiftial breast. Just fancy a 
criminal with us. He has been a great criminal. Let him 
be the cruel murderer ; the base destroyer of woman's inno- 
cense and honor ; the fiendish traificker in the market of lust ; 
the cold-blooded plotter for the widow's or the orphan's in- 
heritance. Let him be the vilest of the vile, on whose head 
curses loud and deep have been heaped. He is taken by the 
hand of justice. All rejoice. He is put to death ! No. 
That is thought too light a punishment by the ruler of the 
land. He is put into a dungeon ; deprived of all but the nec- 
essaries of existence ; tortured by day and by night ; guard- 
ed lest his own hand should rid him of a miserable 
life ; and this is to go on till nature thrusts within the prison 
bars an irresistible hand, and frees the wretch from his exist- 



THE QUE ^11 ON OF HELL. 71 

ence. Now what would be the eif ect upon the community of 
. such a course ? The joy at the criminal's overthrow, once 
universal, would rapidly change into pity, into indignation, 
into horror, into the wild uprising of an outraged nation to 
rescue the miserable man from a tyrant, and to hurl the infa- 
mous abuser of law and power from his seat. And this is but 
the faintest image of what a cruel theology would have us to 
believe of God ! Nature steps in, in the one case, and says 
there shall be an end. Omnipotence in the other puts fortii 
its might to stay all such escapes. Forever and forever ! Mil- 
lions of years of torment gone, and yet torment no nearer to its 
close ! Not one, but mryiads to suffer thus ! Tlieir endless 
cries ! Their ceaseless groans ! Their interminable despair ! 
Why Heaven and Earth and Stars in tlieir inlinite number — 
all worlds that roll through the great Creator's space — would 
raise one universal shout of horror at such a course. Love 
for God would give way to hatred. Apostacy Avould no 
longer be partial but universal. All would stand aloof in ir- 
repressible loathing from the tyrant on the throne, for a 
worse thing than Manicha^ism pictured would be seated there 
— the One Eternal Frinclple iroaklhe the Frinciple of Evil.'' 

EVIL NOT AN ETERNAL PRINCIPLE. 

It does certainly seem a very direct and simiDle 
conclusion that if the life of the creatures is only 
evil it must be because the creator is an eternal 
Princijjle of Evil. If that life is in part good^ it 
v/ill be from the life of Grod in the soul^ and this 
divine cannot but prevail over that human. If 
there be even one dead and damned soicl, and eter- 
nally lost spirit J we must see in that single ruin 
even^ that God lacks Godhead^ and is himself 
tainted wdth evil. If there be no spiritual quick 
to the creative and sustaining energy^ no divinity 
of eternal life in the power which upholds exist- 
ence^ then is it idle for us to inquire after God. 



12 THE QUESTION^ 01 HELL, 

GODHEAD NOT ABORTIVE. 

And SO sure as there is the force of deity in 
whatever beings exist^ so sure must it be that this 
force will strive against sin as long as sin does not 
yield^ and that to this struggle there can be only 
an end worthy of the power and wisdom of Grod- 
head. Any result other than the cure of evil by 
the greater divinity of good, would be a root of 
bitterness and poison of fear to all created being. 
A hell full of cinders even, which is tlie hope set 
before us by Mr. Constable's confident and cheerful 
variation from orthodoxy, would penetrate with 
horror the very core ot creature existence, and 
deepen fear to hatred, and hatred to madness, as 
far as ever the thought of such divine abortion 
should come. 

THE CURE OF EVIL ESPECIALLY DIVINE. 

The one thing which is divine on earth is the 
cure of evil — help for fault, deficiency, infirmity, 
sin and shame, and the one assurance of heaven is 
infinite help for souls, infinite cure of evil^ in the 
natural force of divinity in the creation. The purest 
and largest human sympathy goes increasingly 
in this direction ; tliis is the leaven, which may 
be seen pure in the ^' Our Father'' and the com- 
mandment of perfect love after the manner of Our 
Father in Heaven, and which has been a lively 



THE QUESTION OF HELL. 73 

presence of divinity in the mass of historical Chris- 
tianity^ long hid, yet efiectual to establish under 
the thick darkness of the world the irrepressible 
light and life of God with us. 

tertullian's picture heathen. 

The picture which Tertullian drew, of the tor- 
ment of souls under the consuming j^reservatives 
of the divine wrath, was composed by a heathen 
hand, from heathen colors, and commended to 
heathen eyes — eyes not yet annointed by the spirit 
and life which are the grace and truth of Christ. 
To continue that picture in Christian use to-day, 
or to permit even the smooch of the faded canvas 
to oifend Christian sight, bespeaks a persistency 
of tradition, and a weakness of the consciousness 
of inspiration, which ought not to be. 

THE LAST MOMENTS OF HELL. 

But the end of this draws very nigh ; the Chris- 
tian heart is too full of light, too profound in the 
love of God, too quick w^ith humane justice, and 
too powerful in tender mercy, to continue respect 
for the profane and hateful horrors of the old dog- 
ma of infernal means to divine ends, — of hell an 
underlying necessity to heaven. It comes at last 
to be understood that the Sun of Righteousness 
indeed has healing in its beams, and that the Infi- 



74 THE QTIESTION OF HELL, 

nite Holiness shines with equal grace on just and 
unjust alike. 

HEBREW SCRIPTURE AN ETERNAL EXTINCTION. 

The dogma of qualified orthodoxy for which 
Mr. Constable contends, he first supports by an 
appeal to the Jewish Scriptures concerning the 
doctrine of which, on the punishment of the 
wicked and the particularities of eternal dam- 
nation, he remarks as follows : 

" We need go no further in order to ascertain the clear^ 
distinct, oft-repeated testimony of the Old Testament. By 
every unambiguous term it has pointed out the punishment 
of the wicked as consisting, not in life, hut in the loss of life, 
— not in their continuance in that organized form which con- 
stitutes man, but in its dissolution, its resolution into its 
original parts, its becoming as though it had never been 
called into existence. While the redeemed are to know a life 
which has no end, the lost are to be reduced to a death which 
knows of no awakening for ever and ever. Such is the testi- 
mony of the Old Testament."— p. 13. 

THE FAITH IS ABOVE HEBREW SCRIPTURE. 

It may be presumed, in view of this statement, 
and of the conflicting orthodox belief, that evident 
and exact doctrine can with difficulty^ if at all, be 
made out from any Hebrew Scripture references to 
the subject. But, be this as it may, we must judge 
any apparent or explicit doctrine by its relation to 
faith. If it helps us to think that we have eternal 
life ; if it testifies of spirit and truth made evi- 
dent and powerful for our redemption ; if it is 



THE QUESTION' OF HELL. 13 



'C 



profitable for tlio building of goodly cervico, and 
the furnisliing of godly ministry ; if by it are 
brought the deep sanctities of Divine righteous- 
ness, and the kingdom of peace from the conflict 
with evil, then may we know it as divine truth, 
and ascribe it, but not the earthen vessel which 
contains it, to the Living Word and Holy Spirit 
of God. Mr. Constable appeals to Old Testament 
word merely as such, and with very jalain disregard 
of the analogy of our faith. In this he builds for 
the fire, not for a refuge of the believing soul. 

HEBREW TEACHING, PURELY HUMAN. 

It is astonishing that any honest student in our 
day, knowing ths facts .in regard to the Hebrew 
Scriptures, can appeal to them as a sacred canon, 
or ever use so much as a single text from them, 
except on the simple ground of its evident and sep- 
arate truth. Every respectable scholar in Christ- 
endom knows that it is Jewish tradition alone 
which delivers to us the Hebrew writings, and that 
this tradition is conspicuously human and fallible, 
from its origin to the present moment. 

CHRISTIAN WITNESS TO ETERNAL EXTINCTION. 

From the Christian writings — including the New 
Testament— Mr. Constable draws the following 
testimony : 



76 THE Q TIESTION OF SELL. 

"And what did the Christian preacher declare, and the 
Christian v/rlter write, to that world-wide community which 
was ruled and bound together, not merely by the jjower of 
Eoman will, but by the sceptre of the Grecian tongue ? In 
Sermon and Disputation, in Gospel and History and Epistle 
and Revelation, the propagators of the new religiou, asserted 
of the persons of the wicked — i. e. of souls and bodies re- 
united at the resurrection — that which Plato had denied could 
liappen to any soul. ... In Jesus Christ was that * life ^ 
which Plato fancied might exist in the soul itself. This life 
lie would bestow upon his people, realizing more than the 
conception of Plato. But away from Him there was no life. 
On those who would not come to Him for life there w^ould 
come finally — after stripes few or many — the end pictured for 
all by Epicurus. The Gospel brought together the fragments 
of t^-uth scattered throughout human systems. Those who 
would soar it raises to God ; those wno would revel in the 
sty of sensuality it sinks to the level of the beasts that per- 
ish.''— pp. 20, 21. 

NO TRUTH OF CHRIST IN IT. 

The Gospel of Grod's sinking of souls to the 
level of the beasts that perieh ! The gospel of 
compliance with the sty of sensuality, judicial 
complicity with degredation ! The Gospel of a 
divine falling back from Christ to Epicurus, from 
life and immortality disclosed in the creature, to 
extinction inflicted on the sinful ! It is truly a 
piecemeal construction of human systems, and no 
revelation of faith. Drawn where it may be, there 
is no truth of Christ, no gospel of grace, in it. 
Is Jesus Christ a bodily enclosure containing all 
that there is of the living power of Godhead ? Is 
he not rather a sacrament of infinite grace, a sym- 



THE Q UESTION OF HELL. 11 

bol of the power that worketh in us beyond all that 
we can ask or even think ? 

A STINGY AND SHALLOW CONCEPTION. 

Is it some coming in a formal manner^ by a mo- 
tion of assent, or desire, without which no energy 
of divinity will so much as stir to help the soul of 
the wanderer ? The conception is as stingy in di- 
vinity as it is shallow in spirituality. The turning 
of the soul to Grod is no formal act, which now one 
has not done and now one has ; it is a life, contin- 
uous as being, and permanent as existence. God 
does not keep apart in a place for us to look him 
up and come to him ; The Divine nature is ever 
supernaturally present to human, in an order and 
a law of influence, of providence, of redemption. 
It is not possible to make any terms of pure faith 
speak, as Mr. Constable's statement speaks, of the 
separation of man from Grod. The notion is not 
divinity ; it is stark atheism. 

ANGLING WITH HEATHEN BAIT. 

As for souls and bodies reunited at the resur- 
rection and committed to literal destruction, 
with various degrees of torture, the prey of de- 
vouring hell, one must angle in the deep waters of 
gospel teaching with heathen bait to bring out 
even an incidental or accidental word of that sort. 



78 IBE Q TJESTIOJS^ OF HELL. 

Words enough there may be, on the surface of tent 
and record, which reflect some remaining fragment 
of the great shadow of da>rkness which the pure 
gospel broke up and scattered, but no eye that is 
single and full of light can possibly read, in any 
part of the substance of sincere gospel, any such 
dogma of diabolism, 

LUGUBPvIOUS MYTHOLOOY. 

Mr. Constable does in fact look through Hebrew 
and heathen mythology to discern the gospel, as 
the following lugubrious summary of angelic and 
human fortunes suflSciently indicates : 

' ' Angels fell. jSTo saving hand was stretclied from the 
throne to raise them up. . . . Man fell. . . . How 
many left behind ! How many voices silent ! How many 
pulsations of life stilled foreverniore ! " — p. 48. 

AN ECHO FROM THE FOOL's HEART. 

This is not the voice of Christ ; it is the echo 
of heathen tradition. The w^hole pernicious tale 
of war in heaven, and angels cast out helpless and 
homeless, has no more to do with Christian faith 
than any other dark figment of superstition. 
Equally remote from gospel verity is the fable of a 
fall of the race. The matter could have no sig- 
nificance if we were able to arrive at some sure 
knowledge about it ; the gospel does not under- 
take to investigate the history ot our crippling, 



THE QUESIION OF HELL. 70 

but to summon us to rise and walk ; and, whether 
in or out of scripture, speculation about the fall is 
quite as uncalled for as anything which the rec- 
ord represents as apostolic blunder and folly; 
Peter's dissimulation, for example, or the carnal 
{imbition of John and James. As for that actual 
failure of will which is so much in the wav of our 
living to Grod, it cannot be a matter in which we, 
or any other moral creatures, are left without help 
sufficient for our whole need. To say ^^no saving 
hand " is to import into theology what the psalm- 
ist says that the fool said in his heart. How does 
the gospel perpetually cry unto all who thus doiijbt 
of Qod, " ye of little faith ! '' 

god's extinguishing wrath argued. 

Mr. Constable further argues, from heathen as- 
sumptions, the wrath of God in the extinction of 
all unbelievers, in the following extraordinary 
terms : 

" 'But,' it might be suggested, *at least we shall not, if we 
fall, find ourselves ushered into a doom of which we know 
little beyond what some faint indistinct fears and misgivings 
may darkly insinuate.' Yet even such God's dealings with 
our race show us may be the case. For ages He left the gen- 
erations of the Y^orl^S. to themselves. A glimmering tradition, 
a darkened conscience, nature's indications of a Great Being 
in whom love, and justice, and judgment, and power had 
each a place ; these were all myriads had to guide them to 
the brink of that last step which each one must take for 
himself, and by himself, into the dark world beyond. We 
do not affirm or believe of the heathen that all are lost ; but 



30 THE qVESTlOX OF HELL, 

Tre do know from Scripture that, as a rule^ their future is 
without hope. Light enough to condemn, but not enough to 
save. Light so little as to reduce their guilt to its minimum, 
but not to make them guiltless ; and j^et with this small 
amount of light and of guilt they endure the second and 
endless death. And who dares say, with Christ's words in 
his ears, that none of these lost ones would have heard and 
hailed to life eternal the words of Christ's Gospel, if they had 
been addressed to them by the Master or by his disciples. 
Trom Sodom and Gomorrha, from Tyre and Sidon, He tells 
us. souls would have sprung forth to the living call which 
-was heard and unheeded by the callous hearts of Chorazin 
and Capernaum. But no such call was heard amid the vice 
of Sodom: no such call mingled with the din of the marin- 
ers of Tyre, or with the beating of its vraves. They sinned 
without'law, and they perish without law ; for them it will 
be more tolerable than for others in the day of judgment, 
but they will not for all that escape its endless sen- 
tence."— p. 49. 

SODO:vr AND CHORAZIN THEOLOGY. 

Perhaps we might profitably know more than 
we do about Tyre and Sidon, Sodom and Gromor- 
rha^ and even Chorazin and Capernaum ; or else 
assume that we know nothing about them with 
ttuch certainty as to warrant theolo^-ical inference. 
It is much safer to argue from the highest view 
we can rise to of the character of God, and from 
those undoubted precepts which accord with this 
view. The Sodom and Chorazin school of theolo- 
gy misapprehends the relative value of obscure 
human as compared with evident divine facts. It 
is entirely possible that the story of the former 
ought to stand aside for the revelation of the lat- 
ter, and that if we searched the Scriptures for eter- 



THE QUESTION OF HELL, 81 

nal life rather than for odor of brimstone it would 
be more to the purpose of humble service to God. 

WITH GOD IS NO DARKNESS AT ALL. 

Mr. Constable is quite sure that we know from 
Scripture that the future of the heathen is for the 
most part without hope ; he does not doubt that 
eternity is a ^^dark world beyond'' to average man; 
and his eyes discern no companion for the human 
soul on the way into that gloomy infinite. So 
much comes of not having an eye single to the 
revelation of faith, which casts a flood of light on 
this subject by simply teaching us to build our 
lives on a rule of absolute love to all souls, and our 
theology on absolute confidence in the perfect 
fatherhood of Deity. 

IS THERE A LIMITED SUPPLY OF GOD.? 

That Grod emphatically left the generations of 
the world to themselves^ with but a darkened con- 
science and a glimmering tradition by which to 
guide themselves^ is an assertion which comes 
more by orthodox reasoning than by Christian be- 
lieving. If there be no Godhead other than that 
which appears in the Hebrew and Christian writ- 
ings, and no care of mankind other than that con- 
nected with these writings, it is quite likely that 
the supply of spirit and life to the creatures has 
been on the stingy scale suggested by Mr. Consta- 



82 THE QUESTION OF HELL, 

ble. But if all that penmen have written and 
prophets said bo but an earnest of the infinite Liv- 
ing Word and Holy Spirit, we may trust that God 
has in no case so shabbily neglected his offspring. 
Just light enough not to help, but enough to 
make guilty, were incredibly diabolical. 

ORTHODOX INTIMACY WITH THE ALMIGHTY. 

The elaborate acquaintance of orthodox dogma- 
tists with the divine theory and practice of law is 
a curious, as well as a scandalous, negation of that 
humility before Grod which is the Christian basis 
of theology. Mr. Constable has found out the 
mind of the Lord, ortherwise than by simple trust 
and devotion, and he speaks for God as follows : 

"We are satisfied that the divme jurisprudence regards 
the Yv^elfare of the great numbers as its paramount con- 
sideration. We see the important bearing of future punisli- 
ment as it is revealed in Scripture, severe but never unjust, 
on tiiis widely stretching interest of unbounded space, of eter- 
nal duration. We see how every shade of severity tells on 
some vast destiny of the future, from the severity which pun- 
ishes where tUe hands had been vainly stretched out all the 
day long^ and the pleading voice had been mocked at, to the 
severity which punishes where no clear voice had ever spok- 
en, and where, if such a voice had spoken, it would have 
been heard." — p. 50. 

SOULS BURNED UP TO MAKE AN EXAMPLE. 

If this be true, that Grod sacrifices individuals to 
the mass, and even does not mind visiting with 
doom some who would have escaped if they had 
clearly understood the way and the necessity, what 



THE Q UESTIOjST OF HELL, 83 

further is needed to vindicate the atrocious doings 
of the persecutor? The practice in the one case 
would be no different from that in the other. 
Jesuit and Jehovah alike make necessary examples 
for the large benefit of the great number. It 
may seem very hard on those who suffer at the 
stake, and on those who are burned up in hell ; 
but then it is useful ! The breadth of this use, 
according to Mr. Constable's imagination, is the 
grand point. But for diffusing through the uni- 
verse the impression of one spectacle of souls re- 
duced to cinders for not doing, or for not knowing, 
the divine will, Mr. Constable thinks things might 
have gone very differently. Thus he says : 

** We are by no means prepared to say that if fallen man, 
aye, and even fallen angels, had alone been in question, their 
treatment by God might not have been widely diiferent. Had 
they alone been in qucs>tion we dare not confine the efforts at 
their recovery to those which have been actually made. 
Christ might in that case have taken hold of angels, instead 
of putting forth redemption only for the sons of Abraham. 
Man's day of grace might not in that case have been con- 
fined to his life here from the cradle to the grave, but grace 
might have followed him on from age to age, and world to 
world ere it ceased to strive to win back those who had once 
oflfered to God the pure incense of -^ creature's praise, who 
had once felt the ennobling emotion of the heart's love and 
worship of God." 

ALMOST PERSUADED TO TRUST GOD. 

Evidently, simple faith came near making Mr. 
Constable a christian thinker on this subject. How 
nearly he comes to feeling constrained to have con- 



84 IHE Q TIESTION OF HELL, 

fidence in the universal and eternal urgency of the 
Divine Love ! If he had been^ in the humility of 
total ignorance^ prepared to say nothing at all 
about the universe outside of man, and had leaned 
to humane rather than heathen justice, and to 
^God is Love' rather than to ^Behold Chorazin and 
Sodom'' what might not have been his hope that 
God would not confine his efforts, at future recov- 
ery of the lost, to doing nothing at all ! 

THE PURE HEART AND SINGLE EYE, WHICH 
TRULY SEE GOD. 

It may be assumed that an eye single to the 
service of God, — not engaged with distant and dis- 
tracting speculation, and not perplexed with anx- 
iety to assist the Almighty to maintain the digni- 
ties of universal dominion, but rather bent in pure 
desire, and holy purpose, and fervent prayer, upon 
the simple duties of a humble walk and conversa- 
tion, justice, charity and humility, would have 
disclosed to Mr. Constable the descent of the 
Divine Word to every lowest depth of creature 
existence, and redemption j)ut forth, without re- 
spect of persons, on a scale worthy for breadth, 
and a scheme worthy for sufficiency and effectual 
perfectness, of the alone supreme and blessed God. 
It is not given to dogmatists, full of heady opinion, 
to gain the vision of peace, in which mortal na^ture 



THE Q UESlIOJSr OF HELL. 85 

reads immortal flitc, and the troubled clod becomes 
instinct with the hope of eternal good ; but to sim- 
ple faith, studying quietness at the feet of Divine 
Love, it is given to have prophetic expectations of 
grace following the creature wdth the persistency 
and the po^ver of eternity, not lasting beyond fit 
persuasion, but not resting, forever, until the word 
of the Lord accomplish that wdiereto it was sent, 
and the creature's praise put a crown upon the 
Creator's perfection. 

god's care for individuals denied. 

The particular discovery, upon which Mr. Con- 
stable has emphatically rested his denial of abso- 
lute redemption in the universe, he states in the 
following confident terms : 

"J/ere individual life is not precious in God's sight. If he 
scatters it with a prodigal hand, He removes it with a hand 
that is just as free. In the m^^riads of human beings reduced 
in hell to death, in the extinction of the fallen angels, we do 
but find a particular application of a universal law. Lower 
creatures know not God, and fade away out of life. Higher 
intelligences knew Him, turned from Him, made them- 
selves like the beasts, and like beasts are treated. Hell will 
add its fossil remains to those of the quarries of the earth." — 
p. 39. 

SPIRIT TO SPIRIT, NOT DUST TO DUST. 

What does the author of this argument know of 
the disposition which universal law" makes of the 
living part of the low^er creatures ? And how does 
he know, supposing that the very life of these crea- 



86 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

tures is extinguished^ that man was not made at a 
higher level of destiny ? Fossil remains are of the 
form only^ not of spirit and life. The only correct 
comparison would be to say that earth adds her 
mummies and her urns of human dust to the fossil 
remains of lower creatures. If these creatures had 
had souls, and their souls had been damned all to 
cinders for not knowing and serving God^ the fact 
would afford analogical proof that God may not 
hesitate to inflict perdition on human souls, alien- 
ated through ignorance from his life, and sunk into 
profound degradation. But as the question is of 
the fate of sj^irit and life in man, of the extinction 
of divinity in the nature of the creature, it will 
hardly answer to argue from ^Hhe beasts that per- 
ish.'' It is not true that moral beings ^^make 
themselves like the beasts'' by not knowing and 
serving God ; it is in a figurative sense only that 
degradation brings down man to the level of the 
beast ; his spirit remains, if he be indeed born in 
a higher image, and we are bound to find a destiny 
for that according to laws of spirit and life, not ac- 
cording to the law of ^^ earth to earth and dust to 
dust." 

MAN CANNOT EXPEL GOD. 

And this brings up the point to which the argu- 
ment for damnation always retreats^ that of the 



THE QUESTION OF HELL. 87 

supposed power of man to expel good from the 
very constitution of his being and to adopt evil in 
its place. Mr. Constable says: ^^ The free creature 
can defeat Divine goodness for itself. . . The sinner 
has, no doubt, defeated God's goodness for him- 
self;" and consistently with this he speaks of God's 
^^utter failure to save in unnumbered instances.'' 
(p. 52). But this is directly contrary to faith. 
It is absolute doubt of God. It is faithless unbe- 
lief, no matter how we may justify it. 

THE DOGMATIC LAST DITCH. 

The assertion of free will, or the explanation of 
it, is of no account whatever in comparison with 
loyalty to the highest and purest conception of 
God which has been revealed to us. If we cannot 
reconcile free will and efficient fatherhood, we can 
postpone the former matter until by obedience we 
come to more adequate comprehension. But we 
can reconcile it if we choose ; it is in dogmatic 
stubbornness only that sensible men refuse to as- 
sume that efficient fatherhood in God is as simple 
and natural as it is on earth, and as much surer 
as divine wisdom and power exceed human. There 
is a criminal perversity in standing desperately in 
this last ditch, with the absurd claim that man is 
more than a match for God in the matter of moral 
discipline. 



88 THE QUJSSTIGlSr OF HELL. 

MORE ARGUMENT FOR HELL. 

It is time to gather into a single quotation 
what remain of our selected pertinent sentences 
from Mr. Constable's peculiar argument for hell. 
They are as follows : 

"'Better not to be than to live in miseiy,' was the judg- 
ment of Sophocles, and we ever find the wretched, when suf- 
fering has become excessive, calling upon death as a friend. 
So the close of each agonized life in hell would be longed for 
here ; would send a thrill of relief through the inhabitants of 
heaven." p. 3. 

^^ Their fire is not quenched. It preys upon them with relent- 
less force. No cries of the damned arrest it ; no prayers as- 
cend from the redeemed for the sin which they know to be 
eternal death : no feelings of pit}^ in God's bosom interfere 
to check its course. It burns on, consuming, preying, re- 
ducing, until it has consumed and burnt all. When it has 
spent its force it dies out for want of food, leaving behind it 
the endless sign of destruction w^hich it has brought on fall- 
en arcliangel, and angel, and man. This is the second death. 
But we can bear to look upon it because it is death. We are 
not looking upon a picture which Avould overturn reason and 
banish peace from all who beheld it. Life has left the 
realms of the lost. The reprobate felt, but do not continue 
to feel the consuming flames. These prey upon the dead un- 
til dust and ashes cover the floor of the farnace of hell." — 
p. 34. 

*' To some this death may be an instantaneous process, a mo- 
mentary transiiion from one state to another, like the infant 
who opens liis eyes on this world and then closes them for evei . 
Here may be the amount of conscious pain for the myriadj-. 
upon myriads of young and old who, in heathen, and even 
in Christian countries, from the inevitable moral darkness 
with which their circumstances had surrounded them, scarce 
knew wrong from right. To others the process of the second 
death may be more or less lengthened until we arrive at the 
case of the greatest human offenders, or that more aggra- 
vated one of the spirits who fell from Heaven and drew 
weaker man along with them in their fall. In our theory 
we see how it may be, as it certainly will be, more tolerable 
for some than for others in the day of judgment ; how 



THE Q UESTION OF HELL, 89 

while stripes many and sore fall on some, on others they 
may fall so few and so light as scarcely to be felt at all." — 
p. 37 

*' GorVs wiijfi iclth the .sinner are equal. They are severe, but 
they are just. They are full of awe, but they can be con- 
templated with calmness. They show the award of a jus- 
tice in whose consequences we can rejoice. Their issue in 
eternal death, if it brings the sight of sadness, brings also the 
deep full breathing of infinite relief. We require neither the 
* purgatory ' of Augustine nor the ' universal restoration ' of 
Origen. Looking on the cahued face of death, w^e will say, 
Mt is well.' The woes, the agony, the despair of life are 
passed away from Us features wuth the sin that produced 
them."— p. 43. 

''He wall indeed gather into it all things that offend— all 
the foul rakings of hate, and pride and falsehood, and selfish- 
ness, and lust. But it is w-ith the ominous purpose of Jehu, 
when he said, * Gather all the prophets of Baal, and all his 
priests; let none be wanting,' and 'the house of Baal was 
full from one end to another.' So will hell enlarge her 
borders, and the evil of the universe shall descend into it, and 
fill its wide domain, to be extirpated and blotted out for 
ever."— p. m. 

' ' According to their deservmg is their chastisement. The 
time for each one's suffering over, he is w^rapped in the slum- 
ber of eternal death. Gradually life dies out in that fearful 
prison until unbroken silence reigns throughout it. They 
who would not find life have found death. But the scene 
remains for ever. As Sodom and Gomorrha have exhibited to 
every succeeding generation of men the Divine vengeance 
upon full-blown iniquity, so will the charred and burnt- out 
furnace of hell afford its eternal lesson to the^ntelligences of 
the future. As angels wing their way from world to world, 
as the redeemed touch with fresh delight their harps of gold, 
as new orders of spiritual life are called into being, so the 
nature and end of sin are always remembered in that scene 
where so many of the inhabitants of heaven and earth had 
bid an eternal f are w^ ell to the life of God which is so full of 
joy. That lesson of awe is read and pondered on by all. 
But it will be a lesson read without the shudder of anguish. 
They have drunk the waters of Lethe, 'the silent stream,' 
and forgotten long ago their misery. There is no eternal 
antagonism of good and evil, no eternal jarring of the notes 
of praise and wailing ; evil has died out, and with it sorrow; 



90 2 HE Q UESTIOJS^ OF HELL, 

throughout God's world of life all is joy, and peace, and 
love."— p. 67. 

THE ONLY REAL END OF EVIL. 

Mr. Constable's idea of the death of sorrow and 
the end of evil is the selfish and sensual one, not 
the spiritual and Christian one. It is in the frui- 
tion of love, the success of good, the completion of 
every pure purpose, that Christian faith teaches 
us to look for final blessedness, while vulgar dog- 
ma, following the pattern of heathenism, only asks 
for the removal of anything painful to saintly sen- 
sibilities. On Mr. Constable's theory a mother 
may twang her golden harp with ever fresh de- 
light after her off'spring are entirely burned up, and 
when she sees nothing but the cinders of them on 
the floor of the furnace of hell. In Christ, on the 
contrary, there availeth nothing for her celestial 
bliss but the fulfilment at last of her maternal 
love, through the infinite succor of the Divine Or- 
der, no covenant of which can ever pass away. 

HELL THE FAILURE OF MORAL RULE. 

There is no possible manner in which eternal 
memory of the nature and end of sin, as portrayed 
by Mr. Constable's theory, could be other than a 
shadow of irremediable horror to beings decently 
sensitive to the distinction between good and evil. 
The ^^ charred and burnt-out furnace of hell" 



THE QUEST lOX OE HELL. 91 

could only bear eternal witness to imbecile moral 
sway in the universe, however much it might tes- 
tify of physical omnipotence and the crude ven- 
geance of merely formal law. Happily it is a piti- 
ful and beggarly evidence on wdiich Mr. Consta- 
ble's cheerful hell is promised. If the everlasting 
Sodom is as hard to find, and as easy to explain 
away, as the legendary cities of the jilain, to which 
Mr. Constable makes absurd appeal, the scene of 
ashes and cinders Avill prove no more than the pic- 
ture in a forgotten story. 

DIABOLIC DIVINITY. 

It is a singular circumstance that a nominal 
Christian should suppose himself writing respecta- 
ble divinity, when he makes ^' the ominous pur- 
pose of Jehu," a vulgar and bloody Avretch in He- 
brew story, a type of the dealings of the Divine 
Father with his children, and represents the Di- 
vine Order, not as remedying whatever may go 
wrong, but as gathei'ing into everlasting smash 
and conflagration a large part of the creation. Such 
a diviner may not require either the purgatory of 
Augustine or the universal restoration of Origen, 
but he does require to understand the first princi- 
ples of the Christian religion, the sure order of 
effectual fatherhood in Grod, and the perpetuity 
forever of fraternal covenant between the children 



S2 THE QUESIION OF HELL. 

of God. It certainly ought not to be difficult for 
a sane mind, decently awake to evident considera- 
tions of human feeling, to see the lunatic character 
of a proposal which should make a mother, we will 
say, call upon one or two children in this fashion : 
^^ Let us be happy now with our harps in the par- 
lor ; Tom, and Jennie and Dick are all burned up 
in the sitting-room, and father is a heaj) of ashes 
in the woodshed/*' Yet with such infernal toot 
does Mr. Constable propose tc sound the Harvest 
Home of heaven ! 

THE MASSACRE OF INNOCENTS. 

The nice appointment of preliminary torture 
promised by Mr. C»)nstable's theory might have a 
fascination for a Turkish executioner, used to pull- 
ing off thumb nails, gouging out eyeballs, pulling 
joints apart, and otherwise contriving the utmost 
agonies of slow death. One thing, however, would 
puzzle the interested Turkish observer of Mr. 
Constable's scheme, and that is the indiscriminate 
slaughter of myriads upon myriads of moral in- 
fants, persons born and bred under unhappy cir- 
cumstances, who barely gasp with a first breath of 
moral life before they find themselves about to be 
murdered and thrown into the fire. There has 
never been on earth any monster so brutal in pas- 
sion, so degraded in character, as to be fully ready 



THE QUESTION 01 HELL. 93 

to sympathize with such wholesale slaughter of 
moral imiocents. Can it be that the naked atrocity 
of inflicting eternal capital punishment on ^^ the 
myriads upon myriads of young and old who, in 
heathen, and even in Christian countries, from the 
inevitable moral darkness with which their circum- 
stances had surrounded them, scarce knew wrong 
from right," should not be perfectly evident to 
every thoughtful person ? That it is not is dis- 
tressing proof how little cunent dogma has to do 
with real thinking, or with any proper activity of 
moral feeling. 

THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONS. 

To conclude this discussion, we will looK for a 
moment at the w^ay in which Mr. Constable is 
compelled to dispose of the great doctrine of hu- 
man immortality. His recognition of the j)reval- 
ence and power of this doctrine is in the following 
terms : 

"Neither a future life, nor judgment and punishment to 
come, were ideas novel to man. Heathen poetry and prose 
perpetually discussed them before the preaching of the Gos- 
pel." -p. 14. 

" Before the preaching of the Gospel the highest order of 
heathen philosophy had framed for its satisfaction a theory 
of the immortality of tlie soul. While far the greater num- 
ber taught that death was for all, sooner or later, an eternal 
sleep, there were ' high spirits of old' that strained their eyes 
to see beyond the clouds of time the dawning of immortality. 
They framed the idea of an immortality self-existing in the 
soul itself. Plato, in his ' Phaedo,' has given us the marvel- 



94 THE QUESTION OF HELL, 

ous reasoning of Socrates, and Cicero has exhibited the ar- 
gument in his * Tuscuian Questions.' According to it, the 
soul is possessed of an inherent immortality. It is of neccs- 
Bity eternal. It could have no end : no death. What was 
true of one soul was true of all souls alike, whether good or 
bad. They must live somewhere, be it in Tartarus, (Jocytus, 
Periphlegthon, or the happy abodes of the purified. This 
sublime philosophical idea passed readily and early into the 
theology of the Clirisiian Church. AVe find it running 
tbrougiiout the reasoning of Athenagoras and Tertullian, of 
Origen and Augustine," — p. 4. 

"The immortality of the soul was not a question for Jew 
ish and Christian thought alone ; it was the question of 
questions for the universal human mind. In particular, it 
"w^as the question of questions in the various schools of Gre- 
cian Philosophy. One of the noblest specimens of human 
reasoning, building its lofty superstructm-e on uncertain da- 
ta, that has ever charmed, exalted, and, for our part, we 
must add, bewildered the human intellect, is found in the 
dying discourse of Socrates to his friends, handed down to a 
deathless fame in the * Phsedo ' of Plato. Its object was to 
prove the immortality of the soul — that it could never cease 
to be — that through w^hatever changes it might pass, whatever 
pollutions it might suffer, whatever fearful torments it might 
endure, there was the deathless principle of the human soul 
which asserted an eternal life and utterly refused to die. It 
could never be, according to Plato, a thing of yesterday, an 
existence of the past but not of the present, a figure once 
jotted down in the book of life and then blotted out of it for 
ever. In w^hat terms is the denial of its mortality conveyed ? 
In the very terms in which the punishment of the wacked is 
asserted in the New Testament. Where the latter says the 
soul shall die, Plato says it shall not die; where the latter 
says it shall be destroyed, Plato says it shall not be destroyed; 
where the latter says it shall perish and suffer corruption, 
Plato says it shall not perish and is incorruptible. The 
phrases are the very same, only that wiiat Plato denies of all 
souls alike, the New Testament asserts of some of the souls 
of men. But the discussion of the question was not confined 
to the school of Plato or to his times. Every school of phi- 
losophy took it up, wii ether to confirm Plato's view, or to 
deny it, or to heap ridicule upon it. All the phrases we 
have been discussing from the New Testament had been ex- 
plained, turned over and over, handled with all the power 



inE QUES2:rojsr oi itell. 95 

of the masters of language, presented in every phase, so 
that of their sense there coold be no doubt, nor could there 
be any one ignorant of th^ir sense before Jesus spoke, or 
an Evangelist or Apostle wrote. The subject had not died 
out before the days of Christ. It never could and never will 
die out. In every city of the Roman world were schools of 
Grecian thought in the days of the Apostles. In every 
school the question before us was discussed in the phrasea 
and language of the New Testament." — p. 19. 

IMMORTALITY ^^ A MERE FANCY. ^' 

Statements such as these are calculated to ex^ 
cite reflection. There is no denial that the ques- 
tion is of supreme significance to the universal hu- 
man mind, nor that the answer of Plato is one of 
the noblest conceptions that ever came to the heart 
of man. It is the marvellous reasoning, the death- 
lessly famous discourse of Socrates, and the sub- 
lime philosophical idea vrhich readily passed inta 
Christian theology, which Mr. Constable proposes 
to brush aside to suit his theory of hell. He pro- 
ceeds to the business in the following: fashion : 



'to 



'' The expression 'immortality of the soul,' so common in 
theolog}', is not once found in the Bible from beginning to 
end. In vain do men, bent on sustaining a human figment, 
ransack Scripture for some expressions which may be tor- 
tured into giving it some apparent countenance." — p. 6. 

" At an early period, however, doctrine on this point be- 
gan to be corrupted, and the corruption grew with a rapid 
growth. Of all the systems of philosophy in vogue at the 
time, the most sublime was that of Plato. Of a part of hu- 
man nature, the soul, it took a very lofty and captivating 
view. It abandoned the body willingly and forever to its 
dust, but it ascribed to the soul a life which should have no 
end. 



90 THE qUESlION OF HELL. 

The reader of Scripture knows how earnestly and fre- 
quently Paul warned the Church acjaiast philosophy. He is 
the only one of the Apostles who has especially done so, as 
he was probably the only one of them who had any ac- 
quaintance with philosophical systems. In his warnings he 
does not make any exception. He does not condemn the 
Stoic or Epicurean schools, and exempt that of Plato, as 
some of the Fathers expressly affirm of him. He prohibits 
with all the weight of his authority the introduction of any 
philosophical system or dogma into the Church. He warned 
that it would spoil and corrupt, not elevate or strengthen 
truth. 

!Many of the early Fathers forgot this warning of the Apos- 
tle, and it is among these precisely that we find the origin of 
error in the Christian Church upon the great doctrine of fu- 
ture punishment. Educated in Platonism, they did not like 
to renounce it, and flattered themselves that they might, with 
great advantage to the cause of Christianity, bring at least a 
portion of their old learning into its service. Some brought 
less, some more, according as they were more or less thor- 
oughly acquainted with Christianity. But on one point they 
were substantially agreed. All of them, with Tertullian, 
adopted in the sense of Plato Plato's sentiment — ^ Every soul is 
immortal.^ On this point Plato took rank, not among prophets 
and apostles, but above all prophets and apostles. A doctrine 
which neither Old Testament nor ISTew taught directly or in- 
directly, nay, v/hich was contraiy to a great part of the teach- 
ing of both, taese Fathers brought in with them into the 
Church, and thus gave to the old Sage of the Academy a 
greater authority and a wider influence by far than he had 
ever attained or ^.ver dreamed of attaining. It was in efiect 
Plato teaching in the Church, under the supposed authority 
of Christ and his Apostles, doctrine subversive of, and con- 
trary to, the doctrine which they had one and all maintained. 
This dogma of Plato was made the rigid rule for the inter- 
pretation of Scripture. No Scripture, no matter w^hat its 
language, could be interpreted in a sense inconsistent witli 
Plato's theory. Christ, and Paul, and John, all were forced 
to Platonise. The deduction of reason, half doubted by 
Plato himself, was by these Platonising Fathers palmed off 
on men's minds as the teaching of revelation." — p. 55. 

** Connect the immortality of the soul with the Scriptural 
doctrine of the eternity of punishment, and you inevitably 
create the dogma of eternal life in misery, i. e. of AugusUne's 



TIUi: q UESTION OF HELL. 97 

hdl. Connect it with the other great truth of Scripture, the final 
extinction of evil and restoration of all tilings, and you as in- 
evitably create Origeii's Universal Restoraiion, For each of these 
opposing theories there is exactly the same amount of proof, 
viz : Plato's dogma and a dogma of the Bible ; and, if Plato's 
dogma could be proved to be a Scriptural doctrine, then by 
every law of logic Scripture would be found supporting two 
distinct and absolutely contradictory theories. 

''Accordingly, this philosophical idea of Plato is found per- 
vading and influencing the interpretation of Scripture from 
the second century down to our own day." 

In a subsequent chapter we will show the actual influ- 
ence of this dogma upon the doctrine of the Church leading 
first to Augustine's fearful tbeory of everlasting misery, and 
then, in the revulsion of human thought from this, to Ori- 
gen's theory of universal restoration. ^Ye here merely note 
the fact that the dogma of the inalienable immortality of the 
human soul was from a very early period of the Christian 
Church accepted generally as true. 

Now the immortality of the soul, whether as held by Plato, 
by Origen, or by the Fathers in general, w^as a mere fancy of 
the human mind." — p. 5. 

THE fool's denial. 

The energy and audacity of this denial are 
worthy of a better cause. ^ A mere fancy of the 
human mind/ says Mr. Constable, of a belief 
which ranks in significance with belief in the ex- 
istence of God. If our thought of the dignity of 
the soul can be summarily snuffed out in this fash- 
ion of rude unbelief, the way is wide open to the 
feet of whoever may choose to say unblushingly 
that there is no God. It is by the suicide of rea- 
son that we take «uch a step as Mr. Constable is 
tempted to by a dogmatic necessity. Mr. Con- 
stable terribly errs from a wise method of convie- 



98 THE Q UJESTION OF HELL. 

tion in supposing that he justly degrades the 
thought of immortality by calling it ^^ the human 
dogma of the immortality of the soul/' or ^^ the 
dogma of Plato^ creation of human reason, tradi- 
tion of men." If the idea were from unregenerate 
and heathen man, as the false and degrading theo- 
ry of hell is, there would bo justice in stigmatizing 
it, Mr. Constable's dogma of hell is evidently of 
the earth earthy, and of the pit infernal, but the 
idea of immortality, born of the higher reason and 
purer imagination of man, soars above the deceits 
of fear and the uncertainties of passion, equally 
with the thought of Grod. It is an upward 
thought, and cannot be made to give way to the 
base conception of a nature in man no better than 
that of the beasts that perish, or are supposed to 
perish. If Mr. Constable chooses to browbeat hu- 
man faith in the manner of scoffing scepticism, on 
any point of its ideal anticipations, he should be 
consistent, and deny at once both the exist- 
ence of God and the life of Grod in the soul of 
man. To sniff at the latter as a mere fancy of the 
human mind, is no better than to dismiss the for- 
mer with cheerful contempt. In the one case as 
in the other, the method is that of naked and 
abominable unbelief, as repugnant to the Chris- 
tian consciousness as it is subversive of Christian 
divinity. 



J HE QUESTION OF HELL, 99 

THE SCRIPTURES SEARCHED FOR SUGGESTIONS OF 

HELL. 

The point of relation to scripture teaching from 
which Mr. Constable takes leave of the two sub- 
liraest truths of religion, the immortality of the 
soul, and the universal restoration of all to good, 
sufficiently indicates the heathen character of his 
method. Instead of fastening on such a thought 
as that of the final extinction of evil and restora- 
tion of all things, and working it out to its deep- 
est moral application, the restoration of good in 
all souls, 113 attaches himself most closely to the 
notion of eternity of punishment, and bends 
everything to the preservation of this scripture pit- 
hole, as if the chief desire of his heart were to 
sniff the smoke of the torment of the damned. It 
does not seem to occur to bim that the doubtful 
scripture suggestions of hell may be to Christian 
truth pure and simple as the old dispensation to 
the new, not meant for everlasting remembrance, 
but only for terror to men of hard hearts and per- 
verse and froward minds ; or that in any one of a 
dozen other ways an enlightened faith may learn 
to rise above this bog of per23lexities, the crude 
doctrine of hell. He considers the logic of texts 
*the rule of faith, when none has been proved more 



100 THE QUESIION OF HELL. 

unfruitful and untrustworthy, except for delusion, 
distraction^ and deceit. 

P:EILOSOrHY MADE AWAY WITH. 

It may well be considered necessary to make 
away with philosophy altogether, not merely with 
that falsely so called, but with every fruit of rea- 
son and product of understanding, to make it at 
all sure that Christianity will not unfold a clear 
doctrine of the life of Grod in the soul of man, an 
eternal and universal gift from the Creator to his 
moral creatures. But Mr. Constable's warning is 
twenty-five hundred years too late to take effect. 
He should have been on hand with his small cord 
of concern for damnation to strangle Socrates in 
his cradle, and to watch with every generation 
against the birth of sages and saints, to whose il- 
lustrious faith has been due so grand a career of 
the expectation that man shall not prove dust to 
dust alone, or cinders to cinders, but spirit of 
Spirit, life of Life, while eternal ages roll. 

CHRIST AND ETERNAL LIFE. 

The proposal to regard eternal life as " given 
only through Christ,'' proceeds upon a totally false 
conception of Christ, if it is made to mean that we 
are mortal in soul as well as body until we, by au 
act of our own, enter into a formal relation to 



THE QUESTION OF HELL. 101 

pick themselves up by faith, but that, by the Eea- 
son and Spirit of the Divine Father, we have 
Jesus, and that only those who thus enter 
into this relation, become capable of immor- 
tality. The theory is confused and absurd too 
to start with. It really should mean that we are 
mere animals, without a spiritual part, until we 
earn this, or secure this by the act of faith in 
Christ; but it actually does mean that the Crea- 
tor reserves the paternal right to kill off all who 
do not get an insurance from Christ. In one as- 
pect the doctrine seems to be that we are not en- 
dowed w^ith immortality until we get it from Je- 
su=? ; while in the other it is that we have no 
right to expect to keep our immortality unless we 
put it under the protection of Christ. The error 
either wav is in assumins; that man has no savino^ 
relation to the Reason and Spirit of God, apart 
from some earthly manifestation of that relation. 
The handling of the whole matter of the revelation 
of God to man has been so bunglingly carnal that 
average divinity does habitually assume that re- 
demption is a matter of our individual relation to 
an historical Christ, much as if a crop of apples 
were expected to grow by dead germs picking 
themselves up from the ground and attaching 
themselves properly to the living tree. But this 
is not of Christian faith. The truth in Christ is 



102 THE QUESTION OF HELL. 

not that the blossoms all fell off in Adam, and 
living and saving connection with Infinite Being 
and Eternal Life, and cannot escape the develop- 
ment, discipline, and destiny of living souls. We 
are in Christ whether or no, in the divine sense, 
and only in the human sense are out of Christ, 
until providence and spirit persuade and guide us 
to faith and fidelity. 

THE refiner's FIRE. 

The question of hell settles itself the moment 
we appreciate our subjection to the moral order of 
the universe, and the end of that order to bring us 
unto a perfect man. Then we comprehend that 
there is no other hell than the furnace of discipline; 
that from that torment no wrong-doer can possibly 
escape; but that out of it every moral creature 
will come a son of God without spot or stain, — An- 

NOINTED OF GOD-WITH-US. 



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